title: Integrating ecology into biotechnology.
abstract: New high-throughput culture-independent molecular tools are allowing the scientific community to characterize and understand the microbial communities underpinning environmental biotechnology processes in unprecedented ways. By creatively leveraging these new data sources, microbial ecology has the potential to transition from a purely descriptive to a predictive framework, in which ecological principles are integrated and exploited to engineer systems that are biologically optimized for the desired goal. But to achieve this goal, ecology, engineering and microbiology curricula need to be changed from the very root to better promote interdisciplinarity.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI, USA. tmcmahon@engr.wisc.edu
authors.forename: Katherine D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: McMahon
authors.forename: Hector Garcia
authors.initials: HG
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hugenholtz
mesh_terms: D001709:Biotechnology; D004463:Ecology; D020387:Food Chain