Marine Organism: A Rich Source of Bioactive Metabolites

Introduction The marine resources are nowadays widely studied because of numerous reasons. One of the reason is as the oceans cover more than 70% of the world surface and among 36 known living phyla, 34 of them are found in marine environments with more than 300000+ known species of fauna and flora . The rationale of searching for drugs from marine environment stem from the fact that marine plants and animals have adapted to all sorts of marine environments and these creatures are constantly under tremendous selection pressure including space competition, predation, surface fouling and reproduction. The attention of finding drug from sea had started from 1970s. For instance, about 300 patents on bioactive marine natural product have been issued between 1969 and 1999. So far, more than 10,000 compounds have been isolated from marine organisms. Marine microbes live in a biologically competitive environment with unique conditions of pH, temperature, pressure, oxygen, light, nutrients and salinity, which is especially rich in chlorine and bromine elements. There is no wonder that marine microbial metabolites exhibit special biological activities compared with ‘terrestrial’ bacteria.