**1. Introduction**

308 Olive Oil – Constituents, Quality, Health Properties and Bioconversions

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Microbial biotechnology is defined as any technological application that uses microbiological systems, microbial organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use (Okafor 2007). Current agricultural and industrial practices have led to the generation of large amounts of various low-value or negative cost crude wastes, which are difficult to treat and valorize. Production of agro-industrial waste pollutants has become a major problem for many industries. The olive oil industry generates large amounts of olive mill wastes (OMWs) as by-products that are harmful to the environment (Roig et al. 2006).

However, OMWs have simple and complex carbohydrates that represent a possible carbon resource for fermentation processes. In addition, OMWs generally contain variable quantities of residual oil, the amount of which mainly depends on the extraction process (D'Annibale et al. 2006). Therefore, OMWs could be used as substrate for the synthesis of biotechnological high-value metabolites that their utilization in this manner may help solve pollution problems (Mafakher et al. 2010).

The fermentation of fatty low-value renewable carbon sources like OMWs to production of various added-value metabolites such as lipases, organic acids, microbial biopolymers and lipids, single cell oil , single cell proteins and biosurfactants is very interesting in the sector of industrial microbiology and microbial biotechnology (Darvishi et al. 2009). Thus, more research is needed on the development of new bioremediation technologies and strategies of OMWs, as well as the valorisation by microbial biotechnology (Morillo et al. 2009).

Few investigations dealing with the development of value-added products from these low cost materials, especially OMWs have been conducted. This chapter discusses olive oil microbiology, the most significant recent advances in the various types of biological treatment of OMWs and derived added-value microbial products.
