ABSTRACT
As environment friendliness, eminence and cost effectiveness dictate the future of industries, rapidly increasing awareness towards natural and environment friendly products and processes, is promoting assessment of microbes for industrial applications. However, the commercial scale up of such applications, even when showing great promise at the laboratory level, is still limited. One of the major issues with microbial industrial applications is sensitivity of microbes to harsh and difficult conditions existing in conventional industrial processes. Extremophiles (and their enzymes and metabolites), adapted to survive and even thrive in extremes of environments, thus, can well be used for such industrial applications. Extremozymes (amylases, proteases, cellulases, xylanases, dehydrogenases, etc.), resist extremes of temperatures, pH, etc., due to particular adaptive features and offer great opportunities for biocatalytic based industrial applications. Still, commercial applications of extremophiles are limited especially because they are not easily cultivable. The textile industry, one of the most polluting chemical-based industries, also has limited intervention of microbes including, extremophiles. Textile desizing, bioscouring, degumming of textile fibers, bleaching and wastewater treatment are some of the major areas where extremophiles and their products can be well incorporated and such studies should be aggressively pursued. This chapter highlights the importance and potential avenues of extremophiles in industrial applications, especially in textile processing.
