Abstract
Microbial symbiotic communities of marine macro-organisms carry functional metabolic profiles different to the ones found terrestrially and within surrounding marine environments. These symbiotic bacteria have increasingly been a focus of microbiologists working in marine environments due to a wide array of reported bioactive compounds of therapeutic importance resulting in various patent registrations. Revelations of symbiont-directed host specific functions and the true nature of host-symbiont interactions, combined with metagenomic advances detecting functional gene clusters, will inevitably open new avenues for identification and discovery of novel bioactive compounds of biotechnological value from marine resources. This review article provides an overview on bioactive marine symbiotic organisms with specific emphasis placed on the sponge-associated ones and invites the international scientific community to contribute towards establishment of in-depth information of the environmental parameters defining selection and acquisition of true symbionts by the host organisms.
Highlights
There has been much advancement in the discovery of biologically active natural products that have been used to improve health care and agriculture practices over the last few decades [1,2].Terrestrial plants and microorganisms have been the largest contributors to natural product discovery, today these natural resources have become somewhat exhausted due to culturing and supply difficulties of the producing organism or the repetition of compounds being isolated from known prolific producers such as actinobacteria and fungi which is inefficient and costly [2,3]
This review aims to briefly summarize symbiotic relationships within the marine environment with emphasis on sponge-microbial relationships and the production of important natural products by sponges and their microbial community as well as culturing method concepts and genomic analysis that have been developed to induce activation of silent biosynthetic genes and the production of natural products
The special digestive strategies of sponges are aided by symbiotic microbial enzymes such as the protease, lipase, chitinase, and agarase activities found in sponge-associated bacteria that are responsible for hydrolyzing complex compounds into nutritionally low-molecular weight compounds [112]
Summary
There has been much advancement in the discovery of biologically active natural products that have been used to improve health care and agriculture practices over the last few decades [1,2]. It is known that many of these marine invertebrates contain a diverse range of microbial communities living symbiotically or transiently with their host and that some of these invertebrate-derived compounds are produced by the symbiotic bacteria residing within these organisms rather than the invertebrate itself [28] In contrast to this large number of isolated compounds, only a few have made it to clinical trials, let alone received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA) for use in the marketplace. This fact is further implicated by the complexity of the marine environment and the impact of biotic and abiotic factors on compound production, both in quality and quantity [33] This makes the production of these compounds, either via aquarium culture of the invertebrate (e.g., sponge) [31] or growth of the producing microorganism under laboratory conditions, a priority. This review aims to briefly summarize symbiotic relationships within the marine environment with emphasis on sponge-microbial relationships and the production of important natural products by sponges and their microbial community as well as culturing method concepts and genomic analysis that have been developed to induce activation of silent biosynthetic genes and the production of natural products
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