Is it just me or is the title of the latest paper published on Chemistry Central rather unfortunately politically incorrect when taken out of context? I suspect it is just me, as Google throws up almost half a million entries for “white biotechnology” and the phrase itself was apparently coined in 2003 or thereabouts.
Anyway, the paper’s full title is “Relevance of Chemistry to White Biotechnology” and it is authored by Munishwar Gupta and Smita Raghava of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. They discuss the emergence of novel biotechnological approaches to the bulk production of fine chemicals, biofuels, and agricultural products. It is, as the authors say, “a truly multidisciplinary area” with “further progress depending critically on the role of chemists.” The authors outline the state of the art and in so doing hope to encourages chemists to take up some of the challenges thrown up by this area of chemical science.
You can read the pre-press version of the paper here (as a pdf).