Marine-Derived Molecules with Different Bioactivities

Dear Colleagues,

The world’s oceans have been shown to provide a rich setting with great biodiversity and chemical entities with proven bioactivities related to cancer, inflammation, epilepsy, the immunomodulatory system, microbial and parasitic infections, and many others. Currently, there are eight approved drugs of marine origin and more than 20 other compounds in different clinical phases. Marine invertebrates and micro-organisms represent the major sources of these compounds.

The advantages of studying organisms from the marine environment lie primarily in the breadth of marine biodiversity and the consequent variety of new chemical structures found among marine natural products. Attesting to the tremendous diversity of marine life is the fact that, of the 33 animal phyla, 32 are found in the sea, while only 12 occur on land. The larger genetic pool found in the marine environment has resulted in the synthesis of a wide variety of chemicals that can be exploited in a systematic screening program. Many of the primitive phyla that have evolved over the greatest time in the sea appear to have done so using survival mechanisms based on chemical synthesis. The compounds that are responsible for the successful survival of marine organisms possess significant biological activities that often interfere with the essential growth or biosynthetic mechanisms of competing organisms. These are precisely the types of chemicals that might be expected to be active in cancer-related bioassays. Over many millions of years of evolution, marine animals have evolved molecules with high binding affinities toward intracellular targets. The opportunity to apply these “evolutionarily significant molecules” within a mechanism-based drug discovery program is thus a rational approach to targeted drug discovery.

This Special Issue on marine-derived molecules with different bioactivities in Biomolecules will cover all scopes of bioassay-directed fractionation of extracts, purification, and structure mapping of marine-derived molecules, as well as their biological activities. Biomolecules from marine macro-organisms and/or microbes, the development of new assays, metabolomics, docking and dereplication of compounds will all be targeted in this issue.

As Special Issue editors, we invite all colleagues who are actively involved in research related to marine biomolecules to share their latest findings and results with other colleagues working in the same field. I hope that this Special Issue will provide deep insights into the importance of marine-derived biomolecules as a future source for drug discovery. I also hope that this Special Issue will inspire junior scientists to seek out the huge biodiversity of the marine environment and its future impact as a leading source for drug discovery and development.

Keywords:

• Marine-derived biomolecules
• Bioassay-guided purification of hits
• Structure determination
• Antimicrobial
• Antifungal
• Antibiotics
• Antivirals
• Antioxidants
• Docking
• Quorum sensing inhibition
• Inhibition of microbial biofilm formation
• Pharmaceutical application
• Network pharmacology

Prof. Dr. Diaa Youssef
Dr. Lamiaa Shaala
Guest Editors

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• marine natural products
• bioactivity
• in vitro screening
• in vivo studies
• computational approaches
• network pharmacology
• cytotoxicity
• anticancer effect