Biogeography and biodiscovery hotspots of macroalgal marine natural products

Abstract

This review covers the literature published for marine natural products isolated from macroalgae and addresses the taxonomic details of source organisms, the chemical types of isolated compounds and the location of sampling sites. The emphasis of this review is on the identification of the most bioprospected taxa and regions, as well as on how these trends have shifted over time.

High-value products from macroalgae: the potential uses of the invasive brown seaweed, Sargassum muticum

“…Phenolics, steroids, terpenoids, and a range of other secondary Rev Environ Sci Biotechnol metabolites from seaweeds have all been shown to have potential therapeutic activity (Blunt et al 2015;Gupta and Abu-Ghannam 2011;Plouguerné et al 2014), with terpenoids as a chemical class being associated with over half of potential new natural products isolated so far from algae ( Fig. 5) (Leal et al 2013). The antimicrobial activity of a crude dichloromethane extract from the brown alga, Sargassum paradoxum, has been attributed to meroditerpenoids, comprised of a polyprenyl chain attached to either a p-benzoquinone or hydroquinone moiety (Brkljača and Urban 2014).…”

“…Carrageenan gel, derived from red seaweed, has been used to Fig. 5 The distribution of marine natural products from different chemical groups by macroalgal phyla (Leal et al 2013) Rev Environ Sci Biotechnol immobilise microbial cells, and has been studied as a method of cleaning up industrial effluents (Necas and Bartosikova 2013).…”

Marine Microorganism-Invertebrate Assemblages: Perspectives to Solve the “Supply Problem” in the Initial Steps of Drug Discovery

“…The main driver for this particular focus on MNP was the urgent need for new chemical diversity to fuel the drug discovery pipeline. This impulse led to a major increase in the discovery of MNP in the past decades [2,3], with over 20,000 new compounds described since the 1950s [4]. A large fraction of these new metabolites were obtained from marine invertebrate species [2], which make up about 50% of all extant non-microbial marine biodiversity in the oceans [5].…”

Identificación de compuestos antibacterianos en macroalgas presentes en la Región del Biobío, Chile

“…Es por esta razón, que a partir de la década de 1970 surgió un gran interés por la búsqueda de productos naturales de origen macroalgal, seguido por el descubrimiento de nuevas moléculas (Faulkner 2000) que hasta 2012 acumularon un total de 3.129 compuestos; de estos un 53% provienen de rodofitas, 39% de feofitas y 8% de clorofitas (Leal et al 2013).…”