Marine Bioprospecting Research Articles

The sea covers more of Earth's surface and harbors more biochemical diversity than the land, yet marine bioprospecting has lagged behind efforts to find commercial products from terrestrial organisms. The reasons are simple: Gathering living things from the ocean is more difficult, dangerous, and expensive than collecting plants or microorganisms on land. Marine bioprospectors also lack the rich body of ethnobotanical knowledge available to their terrestrial counterparts, and fewer taxonomists specialize in marine life. Even when a promising compound is identified, finding enough of the source organisms and cultivating them may be difficult. As detailed in this special issue of BioScience, however, marine bioprospectors working in the pharmaceutical field have made great strides in recent years (see Carte, page 271 this issue). Part of a broader renaissance in bioprospecting that began in the 1980s, these scientists owe much of their success to the development of automated high-throughput screening methods, which allow researchers to test up to a thousand compounds a day for their bioactivity. In addition, a better understanding of many diseases has provided a wealth of new molecular targets for drugs. Bioprospecting has also received a boost from conservationists, whose warnings that many of Earth's biologically richest habitats are disappearing have created an imperative to find novel natural chemicals before it is too late. Such concerns