Environmentally directed mutations and their impact on industrial biotransformation and fermentation processes.

Microbial adaptation plays an important role in the selection of improved strains for biotechnological processes and for the maintenance and stability of the selected production strains. Most of the knowledge about adaptation processes and environmentally directed mutations originates from environmental microbiology and from studies on biological evolution. The increasing information on the molecular mechanisms of adapted mutations and on the development of methods frequently used in environmental and evolutionary microbiology, such as the selection in semi-continuous cultures or chemostats, can be used as input and tools for the improvement of industrial production organisms.