Less than 1% of living microorganisms can be cultured in the laboratory, but even this minute part has produced incredible discoveries such as antibiotics that have saved millions of lifes. We can only imagine what other great inventions will come to light when the rest of this enormous universe of living genomes is awakened. Everything is recorded in the genes, and modern metagenomic studies, ...

Marine natural products are a diverse, unique collection of compounds with immense therapeutic potential. This has resulted in these molecules being evaluated for a number of different disease indications including the neglected protozoan diseases, human African trypanosomiasis and Chagas disease, for which very few drugs are currently available. This article will review the marine natural prod...

The cyanobacterial genera Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus are key phototrophic organisms in the open ocean, and ecological interactions between these groups and heterotrophic bacteria have fundamental importance for marine carbon and nutrient cycling. We applied a microfluidic chemotaxis assay to study the chemotactic response of 3 marine bacterial isolates (Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis, Vi...

Citation: Weatherdon LV, Appeltans W, Bowles-Newark N, Brooks TM, Davis FE, Despot-Belmonte K, Fletcher S, Garilao C, Hilton-Taylor C, Hirsch T, Juffe-Bignoli D, Kaschner K, Kingston N, Malsch K, Regan EC, Kesner-Reyes K, Rose DC, Wetzel FT, Wilkinson T and Martin CS (2017) Blueprints of Effective Biodiversity and Conservation Knowledge Products That Support Marine Policy. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:96...

Marine algal-derived endophytic fungi have attracted considerable attention in the most recent two decades due to their prolific production of structurally diverse secondary metabolites with various biological activities. This review summarizes a total of 182 natural products isolated from marine algal-derived endophytic fungi in the past two decades. The emphasis is on the unique chemical dive...

A large variety of unique heterocyclic natural marine products, without terrestrial counterparts, have been isolated from marine invertebrates, mainly sponges, ascidians, and soft corals. Many of these compounds display interesting biological activity. In this review, we report our recent studies on nitrogen-containing heterocyclic compounds (“alkaloids”), as well as some containing sulfur and ...

Because of the highly unique structures of marine natural products, there are many examples of structures that were originally proposed based on spectral analyses but later proven incorrect. In many cases, the total syntheses of the originally proposed structures of marine natural products has confirmed their incorrectness and the subsequent total syntheses of the newly proposed structures prov...

Isolating and purifying new therapeutic agents from plants and marine sources is essential to the continued success of the pharmaceutical industry. One out of four prescription drugs sold in the United States contains active ingredients extracted or derived from plants. 50% of the top selling drug products are derived from natural products. More than 40 different plant species are used, and yet...

Biologists and chemists of the world have been attracted towards marine natural products for the last five decades. Approximately 16,000 marine natural products have been isolated from marine organisms which have been reported in approximately 6,800 publications, proving marine microorganisms to be a invaluable source for the production of novel antibiotic, anti tumor, and anti inflammatory age...