Abstract

The vast oceans of the world, which comprise a huge variety of unique ecosystems, are emerging as a rich and relatively untapped source of novel bioactive compounds with invaluable biotechnological and pharmaceutical potential. Evidence accumulated over the last decade has revealed that the diversity of marine microorganisms is enormous with many thousands of bacterial species detected that were previously unknown. Associated with this diversity is the production of diverse repertoires of bioactive compounds ranging from peptides and enzymes to more complex secondary metabolites that have significant bioactivity and thus the potential to be exploited for innovative biotechnology. Here we review the discovery and functional potential of marine bioactive peptides such as lantibiotics, nanoantibiotics and peptidomimetics, which have received particular attention in recent years in light of their broad spectrum of bioactivity. The significance of marine peptides in cell-to-cell communication and how this may be exploited in the discovery of novel bioactivity is also explored. Finally, with the recent advances in bioinformatics and synthetic biology, it is becoming clear that the integration of these disciplines with genetic and biochemical characterization of the novel marine peptides, offers the most potential in the development of the next generation of societal solutions.

Highlights

  • The ocean has proven to be a vast reservoir of resources for human consumption and utilization for millennia

  • For producing peptides; (c) the diversity afforded to cells in producing short peptides, whereby the degree of uniqueness increases at a rate of 20n; and (d) marine bacteria encode a suite of protease enzymes, both intra- and extracellular, that can rapidly degrade or process peptides, thereby either terminating signal initiation or altering the activity of the signal peptide

  • We are in an exciting period for natural product discovery and the potential societal impact of enhanced discovery of novel peptides from the marine ecosystem is only beginning to be understood

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Summary

Introduction

The ocean has proven to be a vast reservoir of resources for human consumption and utilization for millennia. Algae and other higher order marine life have received considerable attention, with associated microbial communities gaining prominence Bioactive compounds from these sources have ranged from anti-coagulants to anti-cancer and more recently to the generation of antimicrobial compounds [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Advances in the chemical and genetic sciences have provided significant improvements in the technologies available to identify and isolate new compounds and bioactivities from a broad spectrum of environmental ecosystems. Together, these technologies can be far more powerful, and there has been considerable recent interest in the integration of chemical and genetic technologies with the added power and discrimination offered by informatics. In this paper we describe some recent advances in this area and offer insights into where the generation of integrative technologies for peptide mining will spring from

Bioactive Marine Peptides
Nanoantibiotics
Peptidomimetics
Peptide Nucleic Acids
Signaling in the Marine Ecosystem
Peptides and Microbial Culturability
Next Generation Marine Peptides
Anti-QS Compounds
Anti-Biofilm Compounds
Metagenomes and Genomes
Single Cell Genomics
Chemi-Informatics
Tandem Chemical Profiling
The Advent of Synthetic Biology
Findings
Conclusions
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