Microbes in Microbial Communities : Ecological and Applied Perspectives

The book overviews the complex interactions amongst the microbes and their possible applications. Emphasis has been made to include a wide spectrum of experimental and theoretical contributions from eminent researchers in the field. Microbial communities are the assemblages of microorganisms of various species which live together in the same environment and continuously interact with each other. The microbial cells in communities display unique phenotypes that affect the survival and reproduction of other cells present around them. These phenotypes constitute the social adaptations that drive the interactions between microbial cells. The interactions, further determine the productivity, stability and the ability of community to resist the environmental perturbations. These microbial communities live with extremely competitive niche and fight for their survival and genetic persistence. But they frequently appear in niche with multifaceted and interactive webs rather than the planktonic nature. This can be within the same species or with different species, or even with diverse genera and families. It either a competitive winner community whereas the “weaker” strain goes extinct or a competitor that coexist with their metabolic secretory potentials or a separator that assigned their own community territorial niches. Sometimes, it can be neutral or tritagonist. These microbial associations within the microbiome provides the foundation for diverse forms of microbial ecology and determined the applied perspectives for agriculture, clinical and industrial sectors. This book will be useful to postgraduate students, researchers from academic as well as industry working in the field of microbial exploration with keen interest in survival factors and mechanism of their survival by various ecological and functional strategies.

Dr. Raghvendra Pratap Singh is an eminent scientist in Microbial Biotechnology. He has received his Ph.D. from Gurukul Kangri University, India, and is presently working in the Research and Development Division of Uttaranchal University, Dehradun. His research contributions relate to the area of plant-microbe interaction and microbial genomics. He is a member of the Aquatic Biodiversity Society and also has a certification from the Food and Drug Association of India. He has received several awards from various scientific agencies and societies such as the Young Scientist award by ABA-2017, SERB-DST grant, Chinese Postdoctoral Grant, DBT travel grant, etc. He has participated as Speaker in several National and International scientific meets and conferences such as FEMS, Myxo-2016, AMI, PTPB-2014. Dr. Singh has actively contributed sundry international research articles, book chapters, general articles, etc. in various microbiology and biotechnology journals and 2patents. He has deposited more than 400 gene sequences, 6 WGS, and 3 metagenomes at NCBI. He has also authored 6 books, including a prestigious textbook that was published by the Indian Council of Agriculture Research, Government of India.

Dr. Geetanjali Manchanda is working as Head of the Botany Department in DAV University, Jalandhar, India. She received an M.Sc. degree from Delhi University and Ph.D. from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has extensively worked on plant-microbe interactions in stressed and contaminated environments with a special focus on mycorrhizae for the fortification of various crops. She has received prestigious research grants from DST, India, and IFS Sweden. She has contributed immensely to the scientific community by publishing research papers and book chapters. She had recently authored a book on the use of omics technology for microbiology that has been published by ICAR, New Delhi, India.

Dr. Kaushik Bhattacharjee earned his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from the North-Eastern Hill University of India in the Microbiology Laboratory by researching the inter-disciplinary field of Microbial diversity from extreme environments, Pharmaceutical microbiology, and Medicinal chemistry. He took his post-doctoral training at the Department of Botany, North-Eastern Hill University of India, and IASST, Guwahati, India. He has so far contributed over 20 publications in refereed journals of high repute and published about half a dozen of book chapters. He also serves as an editorial board member and invited journal reviewers for many highly reputed journals from publishing groups like Springer Nature, Elsevier, PLoS, Taylor & Francis, etc. He has been awarded the Outstanding Reviewer Award from Elsevier for the year 2018. He also serves as a Certified Mentor at Publons Academy, Clarivate Analytics, United States. His broad area of research Interests includes Environmental Microbiologyand Pharmaceutical microbiology.

Prof. Hovik Panosyan graduated in Biology from Yerevan State University (YSU) in 1999. He received his Ph.D. in microbiology from the Institute of Botany of NAS of Armenia in 2003. He has been a faculty member at YSU since 2002 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011. His main research area is Microbial Ecology and the Biology of Extremophilic Microbes. He has been awarded numerous research fellowships and awards including FEBS Short-Term Fellowship (2009 and 2004), FEMS Research Fellowship (2009), NFSAT (2011) DAAD (2013) and has participated in international research together with USA, European and Asian partners. He is currently the coordinator and leader of international research and educational programs, as well as ISME ambassador of Armenia. He had work experience at the University of Bergen (Norway), LMU Munich (Germany), University of Nevada, Las Vegas (USA), and Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry Naples (Italy). HovikPanosyan is actively engaged in studying the microbial community of extreme environments (terrestrial geothermal springs, alkali-saline soils, subterranean salt deposits, copper and molybdenum mines distributed on the territory of Armenia) based on culture-dependent and molecular techniques. He has published more than 60 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, 4 books, and 25 chapters.