Abstract
Marine microorganisms have drawn great attention as novel bioactive natural product sources, particularly in the drug discovery area. Using different strategies, marine microbes have the ability to produce a wide variety of molecules. One of these strategies is the co-culturing of marine microbes; if two or more microorganisms are aseptically cultured together in a solid or liquid medium in a certain environment, their competition or synergetic relationship can activate the silent biosynthetic genes to produce cryptic natural products which do not exist in monocultures of the partner microbes. In recent years, the co-cultivation strategy of marine microbes has made more novel natural products with various biological activities. This review focuses on the significant and excellent examples covering sources, types, structures and bioactivities of secondary metabolites based on co-cultures of marine-derived microorganisms from 2009 to 2019. A detailed discussion on future prospects and current challenges in the field of co-culture is also provided on behalf of the authors’ own views of development tendencies.
Highlights
Many industrial sectors have stopped their dependence on natural product (NP) drug discovery programs, natural products products (NPs) are still of great interest to many pharmaceutical communities and are important sources of bioactive compounds [1,2]
Recent genomic sequencing has revealed the presence of numerous biosynthetic gene clusters in some microbes that may be responsible for the biosynthesis of NPs which are not found under classical cultivation conditions [6,7]
The nitrogenous alkaloids represented the most abundant class of compounds that were produced by the co-cultures of marine microorganisms with diverse skeletons and biological activities [15,16]
Summary
Many industrial sectors have stopped their dependence on natural product (NP) drug discovery programs, NPs are still of great interest to many pharmaceutical communities and are important sources of bioactive compounds [1,2]. The co-culturing of marine microbes involves the culturing of two or more marine microbes together on/in certain conditions; microorganisms can communicate with each other through direct or indirect contact, thereby stimulating the silent gene clusters to produce special NPs [2,8] (Figure 1). This strategy can promote the production of complex and novel skeletons with numerous stereocenters [9,10,11].
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