Selvakumar Rajendran ^1* Karthik Loganathan ² Ketul C Popat ³

• ¹ PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, Coimbatore, India
• ² Salem Microbes Pvt Ltd, Salem, Tamil Nadu, India
• ³ George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States

Diversity in microbial species, ecology, metabolisms, and survival techniques provides scientists with clues to bioprospect them for various applications. Microbial bio-prospecting especially for bio-derived materials, molecules, enzymes etc have been studied as an alternative to various synthetic methodologies that have both economic and environmental impacts. Applying bioengineering concepts, microorganisms have been investigated as living factories for production of various biomolecules, biopolymers, enzymes etc on continuous basis that have potential applications in many fields (Huang et al., 2022). For example, microbial polyhydroxyalkanoates, bacterial cellulose, biogenic nanomaterials, bacterial collagens, enzymes, protein materials etc., have superior biocompatibility, biodegradability and ease of production (intracellular/extracellular) when compared to related synthetic molecules and materials (Gosh et al., 2021). Considering the advances in research in microbial bioprospecting and biomaterials, review and research articles were invited from researchers through this research topic on "Microbial prospecting and biomaterials". Very interesting articles were received from various authors among which 6 articles were accepted for publication in "Frontiers in Microbiology" after thorough reviewing. A short note on the articles published is as follows. voltage prick electric field, to induce mutations in R. sphaeroides V-0 (V-0). They isolated and overexpressed nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide-dependent dehydrogenase (NAD) gene for enhancing productivity. The mechanism VK-2-3 CoQ10 enhancement was determined using gene knock down study. In summary, the research works reported here reinforces the capacity of using microbial prospecting approaches for developing new products and enhancing the yield of current byproducts. We strongly hope that the studies reported in this research topic will kindle new areas aligned to microbial prospecting for novel product development and process optimization that have not been explored yet. We thank all the authors who actively participated in this research topic by submitting their valuable research works. We are also grateful to all the reviewers, journal associates and co-editors who have spent their quality time in reviewing the manuscripts for this research topic.