Abstract
The increasing emergence of new forms of multidrug resistance among human pathogenic bacteria, coupled with the consequent increase of infectious diseases, urgently requires the discovery and development of novel antimicrobial drugs with new modes of action. Most of the antibiotics currently available on the market were obtained from terrestrial organisms or derived semisynthetically from fermentation products. The isolation of microorganisms from previously unexplored habitats may lead to the discovery of lead structures with antibiotic activity. The deep-sea environment is a unique habitat, and deep-sea microorganisms, because of their adaptation to this extreme environment, have the potential to produce novel secondary metabolites with potent biological activities. This review covers novel antibiotics isolated from deep-sea microorganisms. The chemical classes of the compounds, their bioactivities, and the sources of organisms are outlined. Furthermore, the authors report recent advances in techniques and strategies for the exploitation of deep-sea microorganisms.
Highlights
The deep-sea is one of the less explored and extreme environments on Earth [1]
Their adaptation to biochemical and physiological processes is mirrored in modifications to gene regulation and primary/secondary metabolic pathways that result in the expression of novel natural products (NPs)
This review reports on novel bioactive compounds with antibiotic activity isolated from deep-sea bacteria and fungi
Summary
The deep-sea is one of the less explored and extreme environments on Earth [1]. The characteristics of the deep-sea that make it an extreme environment include (i) pressure increases by one atmosphere (atm) for every 10-m increase in water depth, so pressure varies from 20 atm at the shelf-slope break to >1000 atm in the deepest parts of the trenches; (ii) temperature generally drops with increasing depth reaching values around 2 ◦ C on the abyssal plain; (iii) the oxygen concentration in the bottom waters can be much less than that of the surrounding region, or even zero, depending on the balance between the rate at which oxygen is supplied (by exchange with the atmosphere and as a byproduct of photosynthesis by marine plants in the euphotic zone) and the rate at which it is consumed; and (iv) light intensity declines exponentially with depth in the water column because incident photons are absorbed or scattered, and total darkness prevails below 250 m deep [2]. The access to deep-sea organic material combined with the application of culture-dependent and -independent methods demonstrated the presence of an unexpected microbial biodiversity [4,5,6]. Microorganisms inhabiting these harsh environments developed unique strategies to survive, especially to the high pressure. Most of them are piezotolerant and piezophilic microorganisms [7], but the lack of appropriate instrumentation limits the cultivation of these strains Their adaptation to biochemical and physiological processes is mirrored in modifications to gene regulation and primary/secondary metabolic pathways that result in the expression of novel natural products (NPs). We provide an update on the current state-of-the-art of deep-sea bioprospecting, discussing bottlenecks and current advances in the field, from sampling techniques and cultivation to metagenomic approaches
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