The rapid emergence of resistant bacteria during the last 20 years has stimulated research efforts in order to overcome this thorny problem. Marine sponges and their associated bacteria, which have been proven to be a source of bioactive natural products, have appeared as a promising opportunity to identify new antibiotic compounds. An overview of the major antibacterial compounds isolated from...

Over the past few years, a new and ecophysiologically unusual group of marine hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria - the obligate hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria (OHCB) - has been recognized and shown to play a significant role in the biological removal of petroleum hydrocarbons from polluted marine waters. The introduction of oil or oil constituents into seawater leads to successive blooms of a relativ...

Antimicrobials used in salmon aquaculture pass into the marine environment. This could have negative impacts on marine environmental biodiversity, and on terrestrial animal and human health as a result of selection for bacteria containing antimicrobial resistance genes. We therefore measured the numbers of culturable bacteria and antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in marine sediments in the Calbu...

Natural communities of marine bacteria, an isolate (FMB-Bf3) from one marine community, and Escherichia coli were examined by video microscopy for the magnitude and uniformity of their speed. Natural communities formed tight microswarms that showed higher speeds (mean = 230 microns s-1) than did E. coli (15 microns s-1) or FMB-Bf3 (mean = 62 microns s-1). Outside the microswarms, the marine bac...

Three marine bacteria, Pseudomonas putida PTCC 1664, Bacillus cereus  PTTC 1665 and Pseudomonas pseudoalkaligenes PTCC 1666 isolated from the East Anzali wetland sediments of the Caspian Sea, were resistant to heavy metals of Cadmium (Cd), Nickel (Ni) and Vanadium (V). Pseudomonas pseudoalkaligenes PTCC 1666 was found to be resistant to all 3 metals Ni, Cd, V. Heavy metal uptake was determined ...

The abundance of quorum quenching (QQ) activity was evaluated in cultivable bacteria obtained from oceanic and estuarine seawater and compared with the frequency of QQ enzyme sequences in the available marine metagenomic collections. The possible role of the high QQ activity found among marine bacteria is discussed.

In marine sediments cathodic oxygen reduction at the sediment surface can be coupled to anodic sulfide oxidation in deeper anoxic layers through electrical currents mediated by filamentous, multicellular bacteria of the Desulfobulbaceae family, the so-called cable bacteria. Until now, cable bacteria have only been reported from marine environments. In this study, we demonstrate that cable bacte...

Acylhomoserine lactone (AHLs)-mediated quorum-sensing (QS) processes seem to be common in the marine environment and among marine pathogenic bacteria, but no data are available on the prevalence of bacteria capable of interfering with QS in the sea, a process that has been generally termed 'quorum quenching' (QQ). One hundred and sixty-six strains isolated from different marine dense microbial ...

Marine microorganisms have evolved for millions of years to survive in the environments characterized by one or more extreme physical or chemical parameters, e.g., high pressure, low temperature or high salinity. Marine bacteria have the ability to produce a range of biologically active molecules, such as antibiotics, toxins and antitoxins, antitumor and antimicrobial agents, and as a result, t...