Biotechnological potential and conservatory of extremophiles from climatically wide ranged developing countries: Lesson from Pakistan

Abstract

Technological advances, in developing countries, without considering environmental health issues have generated microsites uninhabitable to organisms including usual bacteria. While extremophilic microorganisms thrive in such locations. It is the high time to isolate and conserve the extremophilic biodiversity from such man made habitats before the environmental awareness treats them to the level of “destructionâ. For biotechnology processes to be geared by employing extremophilic microorganisms, locations characterized with high/low temperature for most part of the year, hypersaline brine and abneutral pH environments may render the respective microbes to do their allotted/required jobs with minimal of extraneous investments. Besides, many known and expected potentials of extremophilic bacteria for biotechnological applications, major attraction lies in operating bioprocesses under non-aseptic conditions for making them economically feasible.

This review after giving a thumbnail picture of extremophilies’ known features is centered on the triad of biodiversity richness, environmental availabilities/managements of locations suitable for respective biotechnological bioprocesses and their non-aseptic designing for a developing country like Pakistan.

Keywords::

• Thermophilic biotechnology
• halophilic bioprocesses
• abneutral pH bioprocesses
• climatic favours for extremophilic processes
• non-aseptic bioprocesses and poly-extremophilies

Acknowledgments

The author is thankful to Dr. Muhammad Afzal Ghauri, Principal Scientific Officer NIBGE Faisalabad, Pakistan for providing some relevant material and Mr. Faisal Shahzad for composing the manuscript carefully.

Declaration of interest

Author reports no conflicts of interest.