Abstract
This review outlines the research that was carried out regarding the isolation of bioactive compounds from marine-derived bacteria and fungi by China-based research groups from 2009–2018, with 897 publications being surveyed. Endophytic organisms featured heavily, with endophytes from mangroves, marine invertebrates, and marine algae making up more than 60% of the microbial strains investigated. There was also a strong focus on fungi as a source of active compounds, with 80% of publications focusing on this area. The rapid increase in the number of publications in the field is perhaps most notable, which have increased more than sevenfold over the past decade, and suggests that China-based researchers will play a major role in marine microbial natural products drug discovery in years to come.
Highlights
Natural products continue to be a major source of new compounds in the development of small-molecule drugs, whether that is directly, semi-synthetically, or as a source of inspiration or chemical scaffolds [1,2,3,4,5]
We focus on the research of China-based research groups on the isolation of biologically active metabolites from marine-derived fungi and bacteria
A total of 897 papers describing the isolation of biologically active compounds from marine-derived microbes were analyzed for this review (Supplementary Table S1)
Summary
Natural products continue to be a major source of new compounds in the development of small-molecule drugs, whether that is directly, semi-synthetically, or as a source of inspiration or chemical scaffolds [1,2,3,4,5]. It is estimated that one gram of fertile soil contains around 107 bacterial types, 105 actinomycetes spores, and 102 fungal spores [8], and we are only able to grow 5% of those microorganisms Another challenge is the concentration of the desired metabolites in the laboratory cultures: microbial extracts are complex mixtures that can make the isolation and elucidation of microbial natural products a slow and tedious process. The award of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine to Tu Youyou for her discovery of the antimalarial agent artemisinin [16] illustrates the potential of Chinese natural products research to produce truly significant biologically active compounds It is only in the past few decades that China-based natural products researchers have turned from traditional sources of natural products discovery, such as plants, towards microbial and marine drug discovery research. The origin of the strains, the diversity and biological properties of the compounds produced, and the numbers and venues for publication of this research are summarized (Supplementary Table S1)
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