Omics Profiling of Marine Environments for Drug Discovery

A special issue of Marine Drugs (ISSN 1660-3397).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2021) | Viewed by 11997

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Engineered Biosystems Building, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, 950 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-2000, USA
Interests: metabolomics; natural products; chemical ecology; microbial communities; infectious diseases; coral reefs; marine sponges

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Marine ecosystems host diverse microbiomes, and these are one of the richest sources of natural products. The diversity of natural products produced in marine ecosystems serve core ecological functions and shape microbiome architectures across all organismic levels. Changes in the physical and chemical properties of ocean environments are impacting natural-product-mediated interactions at all levels. Thus, it is of paramount importance to develop and use multi-omics approaches to describe the existing chemical and microbiome architectures and to elucidate specific natural products involved in core functions, enabling us to monitor changes in these environments over time.

The objective of this Special Issue of Marine Drugs is to publish works that highlight the use of “omics” strategies to discover and elucidate natural products involved in the establishment and maintenance of community structures in marine environments. This knowledge will enable the discovery of marine-inspired drugs and biological pathways to improve the health of marine ecosystems and candidates for human therapeutics. I would like to encourage researchers to submit original articles and review papers to understand how natural product diversity relates to health and how changes in natural product repertoire affects microbiome community structures leading to disease in marine environments. Towards this goal, we welcome research using omics-based chemical or biological tools and approaches toward understanding and manipulating the role of natural products in marine microbiological systems.

Prof. Dr. Neha Garg
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • metabolomics
  • marine natural products
  • natural product diversity
  • community interactions

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 5563 KiB  
Article
Ubiquitousness of Haloferax and Carotenoid Producing Genes in Arabian Sea Coastal Biosystems of India
by Jamseel Moopantakath, Madangchanok Imchen, Ranjith Kumavath and Rosa María Martínez-Espinosa
Mar. Drugs 2021, 19(8), 442; https://doi.org/10.3390/md19080442 - 31 Jul 2021
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 4424
Abstract
This study presents a comparative analysis of halophiles from the global open sea and coastal biosystems through shotgun metagenomes (n = 209) retrieved from public repositories. The open sea was significantly enriched with Prochlorococcus and Candidatus pelagibacter. Meanwhile, coastal biosystems were [...] Read more.
This study presents a comparative analysis of halophiles from the global open sea and coastal biosystems through shotgun metagenomes (n = 209) retrieved from public repositories. The open sea was significantly enriched with Prochlorococcus and Candidatus pelagibacter. Meanwhile, coastal biosystems were dominated by Marinobacter and Alcanivorax. Halophilic archaea Haloarcula and Haloquandratum, predominant in the coastal biosystem, were significantly (p < 0.05) enriched in coastal biosystems compared to the open sea. Analysis of whole genomes (n = 23,540), retrieved from EzBioCloud, detected crtI in 64.66% of genomes, while cruF was observed in 1.69% Bacteria and 40.75% Archaea. We further confirmed the viability and carotenoid pigment production by pure culture isolation (n = 1351) of extreme halophiles from sediments (n = 410 × 3) sampling at the Arabian coastline of India. All red-pigmented isolates were represented exclusively by Haloferax, resistant to saturated NaCl (6 M), and had >60% G + C content. Multidrug resistance to tetracycline, gentamicin, ampicillin, and chloramphenicol were also observed. Our study showed that coastal biosystems could be more suited for bioprospection of halophiles rather than the open sea. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Omics Profiling of Marine Environments for Drug Discovery)
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16 pages, 2592 KiB  
Article
A Multi-Omics Characterization of the Natural Product Potential of Tropical Filamentous Marine Cyanobacteria
by Tiago Leão, Mingxun Wang, Nathan Moss, Ricardo da Silva, Jon Sanders, Sergey Nurk, Alexey Gurevich, Gregory Humphrey, Raphael Reher, Qiyun Zhu, Pedro Belda-Ferre, Evgenia Glukhov, Syrena Whitner, Kelsey L. Alexander, Robert Rex, Pavel Pevzner, Pieter C. Dorrestein, Rob Knight, Nuno Bandeira, William H. Gerwick and Lena Gerwickadd Show full author list remove Hide full author list
Mar. Drugs 2021, 19(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/md19010020 - 6 Jan 2021
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 6964
Abstract
Microbial natural products are important for the understanding of microbial interactions, chemical defense and communication, and have also served as an inspirational source for numerous pharmaceutical drugs. Tropical marine cyanobacteria have been highlighted as a great source of new natural products, however, few [...] Read more.
Microbial natural products are important for the understanding of microbial interactions, chemical defense and communication, and have also served as an inspirational source for numerous pharmaceutical drugs. Tropical marine cyanobacteria have been highlighted as a great source of new natural products, however, few reports have appeared wherein a multi-omics approach has been used to study their natural products potential (i.e., reports are often focused on an individual natural product and its biosynthesis). This study focuses on describing the natural product genetic potential as well as the expressed natural product molecules in benthic tropical cyanobacteria. We collected from several sites around the world and sequenced the genomes of 24 tropical filamentous marine cyanobacteria. The informatics program antiSMASH was used to annotate the major classes of gene clusters. BiG-SCAPE phylum-wide analysis revealed the most promising strains for natural product discovery among these cyanobacteria. LCMS/MS-based metabolomics highlighted the most abundant molecules and molecular classes among 10 of these marine cyanobacterial samples. We observed that despite many genes encoding for peptidic natural products, peptides were not as abundant as lipids and lipopeptides in the chemical extracts. Our results highlight a number of highly interesting biosynthetic gene clusters for genome mining among these cyanobacterial samples. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Omics Profiling of Marine Environments for Drug Discovery)
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