Our current understanding of rumen microbial diversity
and inter- or intracommunity biointeractions is limited. The
classical approaches used to enumerate and identify rumen
microbes by culture and microscopic methods are timeconsuming
and require a high degree of expertise. In case
of fungi, the morphological features tend to vary depending
upon composition of media (Dagar et al. 2011). Moreover,
the huge mismatch between cultivable and in situ diversity
has increased the importance of culture-independent molecular
approaches for characterization of rumen microbial
diversity and population dynamics owing to their high sensitivity,
efficiency, and amenability to high throughput
(Nocker et al. 2007). This review describes the current status
of different molecular techniques applied to or have potential
applications in rumen microbial diversity studies.