Abstract
The prokaryotic filamentous marine cyanobacteria are photosynthetic microbes that are found in diverse marine habitats, ranging from epiphytic to endolithic communities. Their successful colonization in nature is largely attributed to genetic diversity as well as the production of ecologically important natural products. These cyanobacterial natural products are also a source of potential drug leads for the development of therapeutic agents used in the treatment of diseases, such as cancer, parasitic infections and inflammation. Major sources of these biomedically important natural compounds are found predominately from marine cyanobacterial orders Oscillatoriales, Nostocales, Chroococcales and Synechococcales. Moreover, technological advances in genomic and metabolomics approaches, such as mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy, revealed that marine cyanobacteria are a treasure trove of structurally unique natural products. The high potency of a number of natural products are due to their specific interference with validated drug targets, such as proteasomes, proteases, histone deacetylases, microtubules, actin filaments and membrane receptors/channels. In this review, the chemistry and biology of selected potent cyanobacterial compounds as well as their synthetic analogues are presented based on their molecular targets. These molecules are discussed to reflect current research trends in drug discovery from marine cyanobacterial natural products.
Highlights
The photosynthetic filamentous marine cyanobacteria are prokaryotic microorganisms found in diverse habitats, including epiphytic, epilithic, endolithic and microbial mats communities, in coral reef ecosystems [1]
The high success rate of marine cyanobacteria in colonizing different aquatic habitats could be attributed to the ecological roles of these compounds, such as UV-radiation protection, feeding deterrence, allelopathy and signaling [3]
This review covers a range of unique marine cyanobacterial natural products as well as their synthetic analogues having potent biological activities, including anticancer and antiinfective properties
Summary
The photosynthetic filamentous marine cyanobacteria are prokaryotic microorganisms found in diverse habitats, including epiphytic, epilithic, endolithic and microbial mats communities, in coral reef ecosystems [1]. There are a number of reviews on the diversity of marine cyanobacterial compounds as well as their pharmaceutical importance that readers can refer to [2,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25] Instead, this mini review will feature selected potent natural products and their clinically relevant molecular targets, including both enzyme and non-enzyme-based targets/pathways. The selection includes cyanobacterial molecules that have been identified as drug leads for further structural optimization as well as SAR studies These natural products and their synthetic analogues are discussed based on their interference with molecular targets/pathways, such as histone deacetylases, proteasomes, proteases, actin and microtubule filaments, and membrane receptors/channels. This review serves to complement and provide an update on information of two reviews previously published by Tan as well as Salvador-Reyes and Luesch [21,22]
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