While contemplating the main challenges in the field of marine biotechnology, I found myself transported back to when I was a six years old boy, strolling along the beach with my grandfather and marveling at the diverse world of marine creatures which were washed up by the tide. My grandfather would point out their various shapes, how to best pick them up, their potential usefulness to us and whether or not they were edible. This took place in the mid 1960’s, not too long after marine biologist Dominick Mendola’s own description of how he discovered the ocean through his own grandfather, who was a fisherman and first introduced him to the bounty of marine organisms. Mendola later worked in the field of marine biotechnology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, studying and growing marine organisms in order to harvest natural marine compounds and materials of interest for pharmaceutical, medical and industrial applications. His life was studied and reported by anthropologist Helmreich, whose simple definition of marine biotechnology as “a natural extension of cultural practices of garnering food from the ocean,” beautifully summarizes the origins of this field and its deep significance to human society (Helmreich, 2003). The grand challenge of the coming era is to continue to build our basic knowledge of marine environment—only through this understanding we can fully understand and make use of what marine organisms have to offer society in terms of new technology and applications. Indeed, we owe much of the commercial success of biotechnological developments and applications over the course of the second half of the Twentieth century to the basic knowledge and academic research findings garnered across a spectrum of scientific disciplines. Casting a look to the future, it becomes apparent that the current overexploitation and anthropogenic impacts to the oceans represents a serious threat to further biotechnological advancements. Not only are the oceans the world’s largest ecosystem, covering more than 70% of the earth’s surface, but they also host the greatest diversity of life and contain a wealth of unexplored habitats and organisms meaning that they harbor a significant potential for biotechnological applications. Through a deep understanding of the complexity of the marine ecosystem we will be able to protect the ocean and the organisms that inhabit it. Marine biotechnological advancements have already resulted in successes in the field of human health (i.e., marine drugs), fisheries (the development of molecular markers that help to avoid overfishing, etc.), and environmental recovery or restoration (i.e., marine organism based bioremediation). In a study, Leary et al. (2009) analyzed the number of patents on marine resources published between 1973 and 2007 and classified them in five application domains, including the food and cosmetics industries, agriculture, chemistry, and pharmacology. The number of patents in each of these fields increased over the studied time period with the latter two growing by 53.5 and 32.2%, respectively (Trincone, 2012, 2013a). Many of advancements stemmed from basic research on ecological issues related to the chemical defense of prey, or on the growth-based selection of microbial communities in contaminated areas after petroleum pollution, etc. (e.g., Cafaro et al., 2013; Trincone, 2013b). Examples of applications resulting from biotechnological developments include the use of microand macroalgae for the production of biofuel and the development of small bioactive molecules to increase the sustainability of marine renewable energy resources. Marine polysaccharides are one of the most abundant renewable biomaterials found on land and in the oceans. In spite of this abundance the structure and functionality of rarer polysaccharides remain unknown and mostly unexplored. Brown seaweeds, for example, synthesize unique bioactive polysaccharides: laminarans, alginic acids, and fucoidans. A wide range of biological activities (anticoagulant, antitumor, antiviral, anti-inflammation, etc.) have been attributed to fucoidans (Silchenko et al., 2013) and their role with respect to structure-activity relationships is still under debate. A few available studies look at algal polysaccharide degradation in the context of biomass resource degradation/recycling, while in many Asian countries, where seaweed has a long usage history, direct macroalgae cultivation in the sea is actively being considered for the production of bioethanol (Gurvan and Czjzek, 2013). Regarding carbohydrate active enzymes, it must be said that these biocatalysts are described in different species from the marine environment. A recent renewed interest for the synthesis of small (poly)-glucosylated