Editorial New avenues for Microbial Biotechnology: the beginning of a golden era

The first issue of Microbial Biotechnology has just seen the light and it was conceived with the aim of covering an important niche in the area of the potential exploitation of microorganisms in products of interest to human beings. No other journal has attempted to cover this area in depth, although humans have exploited microbes for hundreds of years to produce bread, wine, dairy products and more recently food preservatives, antibiotics, energy conver-sion systems etc. (Sánchez and Demain, 2008). At present new advances in biodiversity, genomics, syn-thetic biology and the more recent metagenomics are opening new research opportunities on the physiology of microbes as single individual cells and consortia enabling us to begin to better understand the immense potential of ‘niche-based ’ microorganisms for new applications. Th