Microbial diversity of shallow marine hydrothermal vents of vulcano island and characterization of an extremely heat-active endoglucanase

During the last decades, the influence of biotechnology increased rapidly, since this field includes important processes such as generation of biofuels, food and beverage production, washing detergents and medical products. Current and future global challenges require sustainable biobased solutions and bioeconomy is becoming an important field to meet these challenges. As a result, there is an arising trend for transition from chemical-industrial to sustainable-biological processes. One of the major challenges is to transform plant biomass to polysaccharides. In order to increase the bioavailability of biomass, heat-active and heat-stable enzymes are required for the future processes. These enzymes are naturally produced by thermophilic and hyperthermophilic microorganisms and their high impact for biotechnological processes has been intensively investigated. Nevertheless, the biotech industry is still in need to find novel heat-active enzymes with suitable characteristics. Therefore, in order to find new promising candidates, it is important to understand and investigate not just the enzymes, but also the extreme habitats of hyperthermophiles, including their microbial diversity. New technologies like sequencing of genomes and metagenomes, as well as culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches, can be combined in order to investigate and analyze hyperthermophilic life and to discover promising novel heat-active biomass-degrading enzymes. The potential of those extremophilic microorganisms for industrial applications has not yet been exhausted.