Abstract
Mexico is one of the three areas of the world with the greatest terrestrial and cultural biological diversity. The diversity of Mexican medicinal flora has been studied for a long time and several bioactive compounds have been isolated. The investigation of marine resources, and particularly the potential of Mexican marine resources, has not been intensively investigated, even though the Yucatan Peninsula occupies 17.4% of the total of the Mexican coast, with great biological diversity in its coasts and the ocean. There are very few studies on the chemistry of natural products from marine organisms that were collected along the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula and most of them are limited to the evaluation of the biological activity of their organic extracts. The investigations carried out on marine species from the Yucatan Peninsula resulted in the identification of a wide structural variety of natural products that include polyketides, terpenoids, nitrogen compounds, and biopolymers with cytotoxic, antibacterial, antifouling, and neurotoxic activities. This review describes the literature of bioprospecting and the exploration of the natural product diversity of marine organisms from the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula up to mid-2019.
Highlights
The potential of marine natural products in drug discovery is invaluable due to the extremely rich biodiversity of the marine environment
The Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which comprises the Mexican states of Campeche, Quintana
The number of secondary metabolites that were isolated from marine organisms collected along the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula is not very high, they display a great diversity of structures and biological activities
Summary
The potential of marine natural products in drug discovery is invaluable due to the extremely rich biodiversity of the marine environment. A priority task for the conservation and management of coastal areas, such as the Yucatan Peninsula, and for the discovery of new sources of novel natural products, is the study of their biodiversity. Pech-Pool and Ardisson Herrera described the identification of more than 400 thousand organisms from marine and coastal environments and lagoons, belonging to 529 species, which were distributed in 13 phyla, 26 classes, 28 orders, 113 families, and 358 genera. The biodiversity analysis of the Alacranes Reef, one of the largest platform-type reefs in Mexico, covering an approximate area of 333.7 km , showed that this benthic community mainly consists of macroalgae (50.1%), seagrass (16.2%), algal mat (13.6%), scleractinia corals (11.1%), octocorals (7.6%), sponges (0.6%), and other vagile and sessile organisms (0.5%) and hydrocorals (0.3%) [9].
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