Abstract
Marine fungi play a crucial role in energy flow and nutrient recycling, mediating the cycling of dissolved organic matter in marine environments. However, despite being a prolific group of organisms, marine fungi have been largely neglected for a long time. Besides their importance in the marine food web, marine fungi represent an active source of natural products. Over the last years, researchers have focused on studying marine organisms to discover new metabolites with antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer activities. Moreover, with the advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies and mass spectrometry techniques, genomic and metabolomic approaches have revealed to be of paramount importance in natural products discovery. The marine mycobiome includes many organisms still to be identified, and the ones already known are still underutilized in biotechnological applications. For this reason, it is undeniable that exploring the marine mycobiome including new habitats and substrates, even those of remote access, is fundamental for describing the true magnitude of the Earth’s mycobiome.
Highlights
Fungi are ubiquitous organisms widely distributed in ecosystems, including marine environments [1–3]
Marine environments represent the last frontier of biodiversity
Marine fungi have been studied since the first record of a marine species
Summary
Fungi are ubiquitous organisms widely distributed in ecosystems, including marine environments [1–3]. Obligate marine fungi are those that grow and sporulate exclusively in a marine or estuarine habitat; facultative marine fungi are those from freshwater or terrestrial milieus, able to grow and sporulate in marine environments. Pang et al [8] reviewed the use of the terms “marine fungi” and “marine-derived fungi” and proposed a wide-ranging definition. These authors replaced Kohlmeyers’ definition by a broader concept. Encyclopedia 2022, 2 considerable hidden fungal diversity from a wide range of environments [9] In this respect, only recently, marine fungi have attracted attention and are yet to find a prominent place in biotechnology [3]. This capacity aids, for instance, in the degradation of recalcitrant cell wall compounds (marine fungi express catalases, laccases, peroxidases) and environmental contaminants (e.g., toxic pollutants and microplastics) [11]
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