Twenty one important things you should know

In the March Microbial Biotechnology special issue on bioremediation, a new feature called ‘Crystal Ball 2009’ was published. In this section leading researchers in the field of microbial biotechnology looked into their crystal balls and speculated on the technical and conceptual developments that will drive innovative research and open new vistas over the next few years. Twenty one separate articles were presented, which contained information and ideas that every microbiologist should know. Aharoni (2009) suggests in ‘Mining for new enzymes’ that the clue for cheaper, stronger and cleaner industrial processes is to dig through metagenomic libraries for the identification of novel biological catalysers. To overcome current screening limitations, either in efficiency and/or coverage, diverse high-throughput screening methods based on cell-surface display or in vitro compartmentalization are proposed. Additionally, finding the appropriate host organisms to express the desired enzymes is still a difficult issue, however, one that could be solved using the plethora of newly isolated environmental organisms. When dealing with global approaches in ‘The microbial reactome’, Ferrer (2009) emphasizes the importance of holistic methodologies in unravelling metagenomic, proteomic, metabolomic and reactomic analyses. He suggests that in order to fully exploit our current abundance of ‘omic’ data, we need to concentrate on a systems biology approach, using many, if not all of the available technologies to fully annotate the data. This approach would allow us to garner more potentially useful information that could be directly applied to biotechnology. More views on global analysis and systems biology come from Dr Svein Valla’s article ‘The future is artificial’ that deals with different issues relating to synthetic biology; because of the reduced cost of gene construction, he predicts an increase in the design of new in silico optimized microbes and the production of super-bugs, not only for use as traditional cell factories, but also to fight against climate change. Valla (2009) wrote: ‘if I am going to be really brave I might predict that developments in System and Synthetic Biology will become a major turning point in the history of man’. He also suggests that systems biology will allow us to understand complex processes, such as ageing and consciousness. In ‘Building bugs’, Panke (2009) deals with the impact of biological systems engineering on biotechnology via the availability of cheap de novo DNAsynthesis. He focuses on the need to elucidate the components that participate in the organization of genomes to boost success in artificial construction. Previously known information has become available in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts (http://partsregistry.org). Again, as in Aharoni (2009) emphasis is also placed on the need to unearth appropriate hosts or developing efficient in vitro systems. In ‘Food and gut microbes for thought’, Arigoni and Brüssow (2009) discuss the previous, current and potential uses of both bacteria and bacteriophage in the fight against infectious pathogens and both chronic and acute disease states. Emphasis is placed on some previous applications, such as the use of bacteriophage in wound cleaning and dressing by the Red Army, but also the current uses of commensal bacteria impacting on host physiologies, metabolism and drug pharmacokinetics. In ‘Predictions: evolutionary trajectories and planet medicine’, Baquero (2009) deals with two different integrative approaches, both complex but worthwhile. In the first one, the hope is set in the application of novel mathematical methods (such as Prices equation derivatives) to predict biological evolution that even in ‘simple’ organisms requires the unravelling, integration and hierarchical ranking of multiple elements. In the second future integrative approach, planet earth is considered as an individual, and microbiologists will play a pivotal role in predicting and treating environmental problems through modification of microbial diversity. *For correspondence: E-mail: [email protected]; Tel. (+34) 958 181608; Fax (+34) 958 135740. Microbial Biotechnology (2009) 2(4), 397–400 doi:10.1111/j.1751-7915.2009.00128.x