Microbial Resource Management (MRM): the road to go for environmental biotechnology
Summary of the Lecture In the 21st century, we are faced with a set of ‘super’ challenges: from climate change to the need for renewable energy sources, the threat of new pandemics and the general demise in environmental quality. The role of micro-organisms in each of these challenges is crucially important and to fully understand how microbes play a part, we must better explore our microbial resources as they currently exist - in culture collections or at ‘evolved’ environmental sites. We need to develop key strategies to deal with microbial communities, instead of thinking in terms of haphazard assemblages of species. A pragmatic approach to this problem is proposed in this lecture, making use of current developments in molecular methods. Also, a list of potential environmental biotech solutions which are appropriate to the current market economy are presented. By ‘upgrading’ the services of microbial communities through implementing Microbial Resource Management (MRM) and combining these communities with novel technology, we can indeed address these ‘super’ challenges.
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