Chapter 12 - Industrial Culture Collections: Gateways from Microbial Diversity to Applications

Abstract

During decades, industrial microbial collections have been the result of the intensive screening programs developed by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and are at the origin of a large diversity of commercial products derived from microbial natural products. The strategies employed to select and enrich these collections with talented microbial strains from the broadest range of sources and habitats have permitted to preserve the widest genetic microbial diversity. These activities have paralleled the development of new tools to select novel strains and exploit their secondary metabolite production capacities following culture-based approaches. With the recent onset of the genomic and synthetic biology era, microbial collections still represent untapped sources of previously unexplored biosynthetic genes and new genome mining approaches are permitting to revisit their potential to deliver novel bioactive molecules with applications in the largest diversity of fields in biotechnology.