Microbial Diversity and Bioprospecting brings together for the first time the diverse and complex sets of technology, data, knowledge, ideas, and objectives into an integrated and holistic approach to bioprospecting. This timely and unique volume explores the primacy of natural products for biotechnology, emphasizing the extraordinary resource that microbial diversity presents and how and where that resource, and the exploitable properties that it contains, can be found. It demonstrates the need for modern microbiologists to have an integrated perspective of science in order to address the big questions in microbiology and is invaluable reading for instructors and researchers in environmental microbiology, biotechnology, and microbial diversity as well as applied biologists.