Preface

Funding

Guest Editors Indu Shekhar Thakur [email protected] School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India School of Environmental Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India Keat Teong Lee [email protected] School of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia School of Chemical Engineering Universiti Sains Malaysia Penang Malaysia Poonam Singh Nigam [email protected] School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK School of Biomedical Sciences University of Ulster Coleraine Northern Ireland UK Rajeev Kumar Sukumaran [email protected] Centre for Biofuels & Biotechnology Division, CSIR-National Institute of Science and Technology, Trivandrum, India Centre for Biofuels & Biotechnology Division CSIR-National Institute of Science and Technology Trivandrum India We would like to present with great pleasure the special issue of Bioresource Technology, which covers some significant research papers presented during the recently concluded International Conference on Emerging Trends in Biotechnology (ICETB-2014) at New Delhi, India. The conference was organized by the Biotech Research Society, India ( www.brsi.in ) and School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India along with the Embassy of Italy in New Delhi. The conference was attended by about 800 participants from all over the world who thoroughly discussed the emerging scientific developments and challenges in Biotechnology. The scientific program of the conference comprised of two mini-symposia on White Biotechnology, and Bio-inspired Engineering, three workshops on Environment and Occupational Health, Nanomaterials, and Indo-Italian Workshop on Industrial Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, and oral and poster presentations on industrial, environmental, medical and food & agricultural biotechnology, spread in 26 sessions under the themes of Biological Waste Treatment, Bioremediation and Environmental Management, Enzyme Technology, Food and Agricultural Biotechnology, Genomics and Metabolomics, Innovations in Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology, Microbial Ecology and Diversity, Microbial Products, Plant Biotechnology, Socio-biological Perspectives of Environment, Bioethics and IPR and Climate change: mitigation and adaptation options. Around 125 eminent speakers from 29 countries delivered keynote and invited lectures, apart from 650 posters presentations. This special issue comprises of forty-two peer-reviewed papers encompassing emerging trends in biotechnology, which was the theme of ICETB-2014. Specifically, the articles have been categorized into the following seven groups: Biological waste treatment (thirteen papers), Biofuels & biorefineries (five papers), Biomass & feedstock utilization (one paper), Bioprocesses (eight papers), Microbial products (ten papers), and Physico-chemical & thermo-chemical processes for biomass (five papers). These articles provide invaluable insights into various problems, offering convincing solutions and experimental analysis. The Guest Editors of this special issue are thankful to the Editor-in-Chief of Bioresource Technology, Professor Ashok Pandey and Publishing Editor Dr. Katherine Eve for providing an opportunity to publish selected peer reviewed papers that were presented in the conference. Thanks are also due to Mr. Sankara Narayanan P, Journal Manager and the entire production team of the journal for their valuable support in bringing out this issue. Last but not the least, our sincere appreciation to all the reviewers for their invaluable and critical review comments on manuscripts that were submitted for this special issue.