The advent of new high-throughput technologies has led to a strong increase in our knowledge about molecular mechanisms of microorganisms of biomedical and biotechnological relevance. Additionally, novel approaches have emerged to investigate the mechanisms related to microbial function, to integrate large amounts of data and to engineer microbes for biotechnological applications.

We invite researchers to contribute original articles as well as reviews exploiting the advances in genomics and related approaches to study environmental microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi. Special interest is related to works showing the use of high-throughput technologies to get further knowledge regarding microbial function to construct novel microbial factories, as well as works regarding systems and synthetic biology applied to environmental microorganisms.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Application of next generation sequencing (NGS) to investigate microbial function and diversity
• Use of systems biology approaches to integrate high-throughput data of microorganisms
• Postgenomic approaches to study microbial function, such as transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics
• Bioinformatics and computational approaches for microbial genomics
• Development of novel synthetic biology approaches for microbial engineering
• Metagenomics approaches to exploit microbial potential and to understand microbial diversity
• Studies regarding yeast and filamentous fungi engineering for bioprocesses