New opportunities revealed by biotechnological explorations of extremophiles

Abstract

Over the past few decades the extremes at which life thrives has continued to challenge our understanding of biochemistry, biology and evolution. As more new extremophiles are brought into laboratory culture, they have provided a multitude of potential applications for biotechnology. More recently, innovative culturing approaches, environmental genome sequencing and whole genome sequencing have provided new opportunities for the biotechnological exploration of extremophiles.