Extremophile microorganisms and their industrial applications

Abstract

Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and are the backbones of all ecosystems. The halophilic microbes are extremely diverse that survive in high-saline environments. Most halophile (salt-loving) microbes belong to Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya, which are found in ponds, lake, deep-sea brines, etc. These microorganisms have adapted their surface and membrane structures to their highly ionic environments. They use two fundamentally different strategies in medium for balancing of their cytoplasm osmotically. The first strategy includes the accumulation of molar concentrations of KCl that requires adaptation mechanism of the intracellular enzymatic activity in the presence of salt to maintain proper conformation and activity of the proteins. The second strategy includes where salt is to be excluded from their cytoplasm and synthesized as well as accumulated organic solutes that could not be interfered with enzyme machinery. In recent years, halophiles have been attractive among researchers due to their adaptation mechanism in a wide range of salinities with potentially promising applications and a source of various bioactive compounds. Therefore, the saline and hypersaline environments could be more explored in the field of ecological niches which have been used for the discovery of bioactive compounds/metabolites. However, these halophiles are potential sources for a wide range of new therapeutic compounds. The aim of this introductory chapter is to provide brief perspectives on microbial ecology and highlight the applications in various fields and also understand the function and ecological roles of microbial community in saline environment. It also concludes putting the current status and future prospective with potential applications using advanced approaches derived from genomics and proteomics.