Introductory Chapter: A Brief Overview of Archaeal Applications Introductory Chapter: A Brief Overview of Archaeal Applications

The first member of the Archaea was described in 1880 [1–3]. Yet, the recognition and formal description of the domain Archaea, as separated from Bacteria and Eukarya, occurred in 1977 during early phylogenetic analyses based upon ribosomal DNA sequences [4–6]. Indeed, members of the archaeal domain are characterized by several distinguishing traits [3] as confirmed later based on the first complete archaeal genome sequence obtained by Bult et al. [7] and the subsequent finished and ongoing archaeal sequencing projects (https://gold.jgi.doe.gov/organisms?Organism. Domain=ARCHAEAL, ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/refseq/archaea/) [8, 9].


The book 'Archaea -New Biocatalysts, Novel Pharmaceuticals and Various Biotechnological Applications' contains five chapters.
The first chapter is an Introductory Chapter, where editors give a general overview of the content of the book.
The second chapter by Castro-Fernandez et al., entitled 'Evolution, metabolism and molecular mechanisms underlying extreme adaptation of Euryarchaeota and its biotechnological potential', provides an interesting depiction of the phylum Euryarchaeota in terms of evolutive history, metabolic strategies, lipid composition, proteic structural adaptations and its biotechnological applications.
The third chapter 'Archaebiotics: archaea as pharmabiotics for treating chronic disease in humans?' was written by Ben Hania and co-authors. It promotes the idea that some specific archaea are potential next-generation probiotics.
The fourth chapter 'Biocompounds from haloarchaea and their uses in biotechnology' by Torregrosa-Crespo et al., emphasizes the main characteristics of biocompounds from haloarchaea and their potential uses in biomedicine, pharmacy and industry.
The book concludes with a (fifth) chapter by Mizuno et al., entitled 'Plasmid curing is a promising approach to improve thermophiles for biotechnological applications: perspectives in archaea', providing a new tip based on the plasmid-curing approach for improving the potential of thermophiles in various biotechnological applications.
Finally, we would like to thank all authors for their contributions. We are also grateful to InTech Publishing Process Managers, particularly Ms. Mirena Čalmić, Ms. Romina Rovan and Ms. Ana Pantar, who assisted us with patience until the publication of this book.