Development of Novel Drugs from Marine Surface Associated Microorganisms

Abstract

While the oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, marine derived microbial natural products have been largely unexplored. The marine environment is a habitat for many unique microorganisms, which produce biologically active compounds (“bioactives”) to adapt to particular environmental conditions. For example, marine surface associated microorganisms have proven to be a rich source for novel bioactives because of the necessity to evolve allelochemicals capable of protecting the producer from the fierce competition that exists between microorganisms on the surfaces of marine eukaryotes. Chemically driven interactions are also important for the establishment of cross-relationships between microbes and their eukaryotic hosts, in which organisms producing antimicrobial compounds (“antimicrobials”), may protect the host surface against over colonisation in return for a nutrient rich environment. As is the case for bioactive discovery in general, progress in the detection and characterization of marine microbial bioactives has been limited by a number of obstacles, such as unsuitable culture conditions, laborious purification processes, and a lack of de-replication. However many of these limitations are now being overcome due to improved microbial cultivation techniques, microbial (meta-) genomic analysis and novel sensitive analytical tools for structural elucidation. Here we discuss how these technical advances, together with a better understanding of microbial and chemical ecology, will inevitably translate into an increase in the discovery and development of novel drugs from marine microbial sources in the future.

Mini-review: Inhibition of biofouling by marine microorganisms

“…Over this period of time, several comprehensive reviews have been published on the properties of AF compounds Fusetani 2011), larval settlement (Hadfield 2010;Thiyagarajan 2010), properties of epibiotic bacteria Penesyan et al 2010;Harder et al 2012;Wahl et al 2012) and chemical ecology (Paul & Ritson-Williams 2008;Paul et al 2011). Interference with microbial QS as a mechanism to control marine biofilms has been the subject of another recent review ); therefore, this topic has been excluded from this article.…”

Anti-HIV-1 activity of phlorotannin derivative 8,4‴-dieckol from Korean brown alga Ecklonia cava

“…8) There are quite big amounts of marine-based natural products which are reported to have bioactivities like antifungal and antimicrobial effects. 9,10) In addition, several natural products from marine organisms have been reported to express bioactivity against prevalent diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and obesity. [11][12][13] So far, numerous compounds isolated from natural resources have been reported to exhibit significant anti-HIV activity and inhibit HIV-1 activity in almost every stage of the viral life cycle.…”

Antiangiogenic, wound healing and antioxidant activity ofCladosporium cladosporioides(Endophytic Fungus) isolated from seaweed (Sargassum wightii)

“…have been extensively studied for their natural product content (Stamatios et al 2013; García Caballero et al 2014). Lately, marine microbes, especially fungi are emerging as a source of novel bioactive secondary metabolites (Penesyan et al 2010). The kingdom of fungi is one of the largest groups of organisms found widely distributed in nature.…”