To what extent can the private sector be relied upon for the protection of biological diversity? Bioprospecting, the search for valuable products such as pharmaceuticals in biological organisms, is one incentive mechanism that has received much recent attention in the literature (Polasky et al. 1993, Polasky and Solow 1995, Simpson et al. 1996, Koo and Wright 1999, Rausser and Small 2000). Simp...

This paper attempts to review the literature and the emerging policy issues on valuation of plant diversity for pharmaceutical uses. Some of the acclaimed valuation works done in the last 15 years (1985–2000) have been considered for this purpose. Their methodologies have been scrutinized, findings evaluated and policy recommendations examined. Since these studies were meant to address differen...

The ocean dominates the surface of our planet and plays a major role in regulating the biosphere. For example, the microscopic photosynthetic organisms living within provide 50% of the oxygen we breathe, and much of our food and mineral resources are extracted from the ocean. In a time of ecological crisis and major changes in our society, it is essential to turn our attention towards the sea t...

With Volume 2 of eCAM, we begin to intensify the inclusion of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)-related natural products derived from plants and from animals (1). There will be an attempt to focus on products from animals, since we know that the literature tends to be ‘glutted’ with products derived from plants (1,2). In either case, both sources of natural products provide a veritab...

There is growing demand for new bioactive compounds and biologicals for the pharmaceutical, agro- and food industries. Plant-associated microbes present an attractive and promising source to this end, but are nearly unexploited. Therefore, bioprospecting of plant microbiomes is gaining more and more attention. Due to their highly specialized and co-evolved genetic pool, plant microbiomes host a...

Podophyllotoxin is a natural lignan that is currently being used as a precursor to semi-synthetic anticancer drugs etoposide, teniposide, and etopophos. These compounds have been used for the treatment of lung and testicular cancers as well as certain leukemias (Stahelin and Wartburg 1991; Imbert 1998). The patent for the use of etoposide in such therapies expired in 1995 and since then, etopos...

Marine bioprospecting is the search for new marine bioactive compounds and large-scale screening in extracts represents the traditional approach. Here, we report an alternative complementary protocol, called digital marine bioprospecting, based on deep sequencing of transcriptomes. We sequenced the transcriptomes from the adult polyp stage of two cold-water sea anemones, Bolocera tuediae and Ho...