AbstractMetagenomics has emerged as one of the important tools that can endow bottomless insights about the molecular diversity, distribution, ecological roles, microbial grouping and fastidious biological functions of microorganisms in a particular environment. In the present investigation, we explored metagenomics to delineate the molecular diversity of lipid degrading enzymes from one of the cold deserts located at Drass region of Jammu, India. Lipases have been implicated in number of industrial applications that mainly include the food, detergents and bioremediation of the oil contaminated sites. To meet our aim, we used degenerate primers to amplify conserve domain of lipase that encode the catalytic site, from the environmental DNA, followed by pyrosequencing and analysis of the amplified DNA fragments. Interestingly, analysis of the sequencing report revealed diverse classes of lipases from variety of microorganisms, many of which were observed to be unique, having no known representative in the gene database, and henece considered to be novel. The sequenced fragments were aligned and translated into the amino acid sequences, the average length of the translated amino acid sequences were observed to be