Microbial Diversity: Its Exploration and Need of Conservation - Applied Environmental Biotechnology: Present Scenario and Future Trends - page 56

4.8 Consequences of Ignoring

the Conservation of Microbial
Diversity

biology can be applied to the study of natural mi-
crobial ecosystems. These methods characterize
the microbial processes and thereby can be used
to reach a better understanding of microbial di-
versity. In future, these techniques can be used
to analyze microbial diversity quantitatively and
expand our understanding of their ecological pro-
cesses to make our ecosystem livelier.

In today's scenario the research is mainly focused
on the profitable and producible projects where
one can make his future. Due to some funding
constraints, the hard core taxonomy projects are
not going on in a massive scale. If this philosophy
continues, the role and identification of numer-
ous unknown microorganisms will be lost. Major
ecological changes are occurring already which
may result into deleterious ecosystem conditions.

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4.9 Conclusion

With respect to the role of microorganisms in
sustainable development, little is known about
the potential contribution of microbial diversity
to the national economy, to wealth creation and to
improvements in the quality of life. An apprecia-
tion of these factors might be one way of chang-
ing government and public perception of micro-
organisms by showing that the sustainable use of
microbial diversity has positive economic value.
This would help justify the costs involved in con-
serving microbial diversity, but equally provide a
useful indicator of the costs of inaction. In terms
of the scientific rationale needed to underpin pol-
icy, quantification of microbial diversity has been
limited. This makes it difficult to indicate what
needs to be conserved in order to support the bio-
technology industries and to understand fully the
interactions between organisms responsible for
maintaining a functional ecosystem.
Microbial diversity in natural environments is
extensive. Methods for studying diversity vary
and diversity can be studied at different levels,
i.e., at global, community, and population lev-
els. The molecular perspective gives us more
than just a sight of the evolutionary past; it also
brings a new future to the discipline of microbial
ecology. Since the molecular-phylogenetic iden-
tifications are based on sequences, as opposed
to metabolic properties, microbes can be iden-
tified without being cultivated. Consequently,
all the sequence-based techniques of molecular