Abstract
Over the last decade, genome sequences and other -omics datasets have been produced for a wide range of microalgae, and several others are on the way. Marine microalgae possess distinct and unique metabolic pathways, and can potentially produce specific secondary metabolites with biological activity (e.g., antipredator, allelopathic, antiproliferative, cytotoxic, anticancer, photoprotective, as well as anti-infective and antifouling activities). Because microalgae are very diverse, and adapted to a broad variety of environmental conditions, the chances to find novel and unexplored bioactive metabolites with properties of interest for biotechnological and biomedical applications are high. This review presents a comprehensive overview of the current efforts and of the available solutions to produce, explore and exploit -omics datasets, with the aim of identifying species and strains with the highest potential for the identification of novel marine natural products. In addition, funding efforts for the implementation of marine microalgal -omics resources and future perspectives are presented as well.
Highlights
The advent of the -omics era, and the development of the related technologies for the acquisition and analysis of the amount of big datasets available, has revolutionized biological research
Other efforts have been devoted to improve the carotenoid content in diatoms: one attempt to overexpress the phytoene synthase (PSY) in P. tricornutum led to increased fucoxanthin content in one transformant by approximately 1.45-fold with respect to the levels in the wild-type [111]
Despite the number of compounds isolated from marine organisms, marine biotechnology projects focusing on drug discovery from marine microalgae have been very scarce in the 7th Framework
Summary
The advent of the -omics era, and the development of the related technologies for the acquisition and analysis of the amount of big datasets available, has revolutionized biological research. The most common pipeline for drug discovery from microalgae includes their cultivation in small or large volumes (e.g., by using photobioreactors), their pellet concentration (by centrifugation or filtration), chemical extraction of the microalgal pellets, which can be performed with various protocols in order to find the metabolites of interest, e.g., [12], and screening of the extracts for different bioactivities (e.g., antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and anticancer testing). The chance to obtain a continuous source of MNPs from marine microalgae, generally more amenable to culturing compared to macro-organisms, may be able to meet the challenging demands of the food, nutraceutical and cosmaceutical market. They represent a renewable and still poorly explored resource for drug discovery.
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