Focus on microbial – based production seeks to curb the predicament of pollution and high consumption of oil resulting from petroleum based production. Industrial biotechnology aims to complete as a stronger alternative ensuring environmental friendly microbial based production. However, the high cost of bioprocessing is a major drawback and therefore new approaches must be developed to overcome this challenge. Halophiles have recently shown potentials of overcoming this challenge and are of much preference for unsterile and continuous contamination free bio-processing due to their unique ability to grow in high salt concentration and alkali medium under high temperature. At the same time, recent advances in genetic manipulations have been established to better the performance of halophiles for industrial applications. To date, a number of products such as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), ectoines, bio-surfactants, antioxidants etc have been produced from halophiles and further efforts have been established to develop halophiles as the foundation for low cost bio-processing.
