Marine Drugs, Volume 15, Issue 4

Nature provides a variety of peptides that are expressed in most living species. Evolutionary pressure and natural selection have created and optimized these peptides to bind to receptors with high affinity. Hence, natural resources provide an abunda...

Natural products from marine origin constitute a very promising and underexplored source of interesting compounds for modern biotechnological and pharmaceutical industries. However, their evaluation is quite challenging and requires specifically desi...

Background: Low-molecular-weight fucoidan (LMF) is widely used as a food supplement for cancer patients. However, all of the studies are in vitro or were conducted using mice. Therefore, powerful clinical evidence for LMF use is relatively weak. This...

A bioactivity guided study of a cf. Caldora penicillata species, collected during a 2013 expedition to the Pacific island of Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands (a commonwealth of the USA), led to the isolation of a new thiazoline-containing alkaloid, l...

A new sterol, (23R)-methoxycholest-5,24-dien-3β-ol (1), two new ceramides, (2S,3R,4E,8E)-2-(tetradecanoylamino)-4,8-octadecadien-l,3-diol (6) and (2S,3R,2′R,4E,8E)-2-(tetradecanoylamino)-4,8-octadecadien-l,3,2′-triol (7), together with three known st...

Seaweed, a popular and abundant food ingredient mainly consumed in Asian countries, is a good source of bioactive compounds with anti-obesity effects. However, the anti-obesity effects of Sargassum thunbergii have not yet been established. In this st...

The oceans encompass a wide range of habitats and environmental conditions, which host a huge microbial biodiversity. The unique characteristics of several marine systems have driven a variety of biological adaptations, leading to the production of a...

Alginate (Alg) is a renewable polymer with excellent hemostatic properties and biocapability and is widely used for hemostatic wound dressing. However, the swelling properties of alginate-based wound dressings need to be promoted to meet the requirem...

Lycopene cyclases cyclize the open ends of acyclic lycopene (ψ,ψ-carotene) into β- or ε-ionone rings in the crucial bifurcation step of carotenoid biosynthesis. Among all carotenoid constituents, β-carotene (β,β-carotene) is found in all photosynthet...

Bioassay-guided separation of a lipophilic extract of the crinoid Alloeocomatella polycladia, inhibiting the activity of HCV NS3 helicase, yielded two groups of molecules: cholesterol sulfate and four new aromatic sulfates 1–4. The structures of the...

Schizochytrium protein hydrolysate (SPH) was prepared through stepwise enzymatic hydrolysis by alcalase and flavourzyme sequentially. The proportion of hydrophobic amino acids of SPH was 34.71%. The molecular weight (MW) of SPH was principally concen...

The goal of this work was to identify sequences encoding monooxygenase biocatalysts with novel features by in silico mining an assembled metagenomic dataset of polar and subpolar marine sediments. The targeted enzyme sequences were Baeyer–Villiger an...

Low molecular weight fucoidan (LMF) has been reported to possess anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities. Thus, we examined the effects of LMF extracted from Undaria pinnatifida on dermal wounds. Five round dermal wounds were created on the dors...

Four bioactive compounds have been isolated from the fungus Oidiodendron griseum UBOCC-A-114129 cultivated from deep subsurface sediment. They were structurally characterized using a combination of LC–MS/MS and NMR analyses as fuscin and its derivati...

The combined effects of low-molecular-weight fucoidan (LMF) and fucoxanthin (Fx) in terms of antihyperglycemic, antihyperlipidemic, and hepatoprotective activities were investigated in a mouse model of type II diabetes. The intake of LMF, Fx, and LMF...

Three new compounds, enhygromic acid (1) and deoxyenhygrolides A (2) and B (3), were isolated from a marine myxobacterium, Enhygromyxa sp. Compound 1 was found to be an acrylic acid derivative with a rare polycyclic carbon skeleton, decahydroacenapht...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases. Recent studies suggest that sulfated hetero-polysaccharides (UF) protect against developing PD. However, the detailed mechanisms of how UF suppress neuronal death have not...

Lindane is an organochlorine pesticide belonging to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that has been widely used to treat agricultural pests. It is of particular concern because of its toxicity, persistence and tendency to bioaccumulate in terrestr...

Sterol 14α-demethylases from Cytochrome P450 family (CYP51s) are essential enzymes in sterol biosynthesis and well-known as the target of antifungal drugs. The 3D structure of CYP51A from Penicillium italicum (PiCYP51A) was constructed through homolo...

Phloroglucinol is a phenolic compound that is one of the major compounds in Ecklonia cava (brown alga). It has many pharmacological activities, but its anti-diabetic effect is not yet fully explored. In this study, we investigated the effect of phlor...

An aqueous solution was successfully prepared using a low-molecular-weight chitosan oligomer and FITC, and its structural and fluorescent properties were observed by using ¹H NMR, ¹³C NMR, FT-IR, XRD, UV-Vis, and PL spectrometry. Its application as a...

The stone fish is an under-utilized sea cucumber with many nutritional and ethno-medicinal values. This study aimed to establish the conditions for its optimum hydrolysis with bromelain to generate angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE)-inhibitory hyd...

Burns can cause tremendous economic problems associated with irreparable harm to patients and their families. To characterize marine collagen peptides (MCPs) from the skin of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), molecular weight distribution and ami...

The potential of marine natural products to become new drugs is vast; however, research is still in its infancy. The chemical and biological diversity of marine toxins is immeasurable and as such an extraordinary resource for the discovery of new dru...

The treatment of micturition disorders creates a serious problem for urologists. Recently, new therapeutic agents, such as neurotoxins, are being considered for the therapy of urological patients. The present study investigated the chemical coding of...

Substances with valuable antitumor properties have been identified in many marine algae, including an edible polysaccharide from the marine alga Gracilariopsis lemaneiformis (PGL). We previously reported transcriptome profiling data showing that PGL...

This study began with the goal of identifying constituents from Zyzzya fuliginosa extracts that showed selectivity in our primary cytotoxicity screen against the PANC-1 tumor cell line. During the course of this project, which focused on six Z. fulig...

In this review, we have attempted to describe all of the antibody–drug conjugates using a marine-derived compound as the “warhead”, that are currently in clinical trials as listed in the current version of the NIH clinical trials database (clinicaltr...

Different biological sources of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) in mainstream commercial products include algae and fish. Lipid oxidation in n-3 PUFA-rich oil is the most important cause of its deterioration. We investigated the kinetic pa...

Chitosan is a versatile polysaccharide of biological origin. Due to the biocompatible and biodegradable nature of chitosan, it is intensively utilized in biomedical applications in scaffold engineering as an absorption enhancer, and for bioactive and...

Biofuel production using microalgae is believed to have the advantage of continuous year-round production over crop plants, which have strong seasonality. However, actual year-round production of microalgal lipids using outdoor mass cultivation has r...

In previous review articles the attention of the biocatalytically oriented scientific community towards the marine environment as a source of biocatalysts focused on the habitat-related properties of marine enzymes. Updates have already appeared in t...

Sponges are important sources of bioactive secondary metabolites. These compounds are frequently synthesized by bacterial symbionts, which may be recruited from the surrounding seawater or transferred to the sponge progeny by the parent. In this stud...

Carrageenan, agarose, and alginate are algae-derived undigested polysaccharides that have been used as food additives for hundreds of years. Fermentation of dietary carbohydrates of our food in the lower gut of humans is a critical process for the fu...

Chitin is the second most abundant biopolymer on Earth and is mainly comprised of a marine invertebrate, consisting of repeating β-1,4 linked N-acetylated glucosamine units, whereas its N-deacetylated product, chitosan, has broad medical applications...

Marine sponges contain a variety of low-molecular-weight compounds including guanidine alkaloids possessing different biological activities. Monanchomycalin B and urupocidin A were isolated from the marine sponge Monanchora pulchra. We found that the...

As part of an international research project, the marine fungal strain collection of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research (GEOMAR) research centre was analysed for secondary metabolite profiles associated with anticancer activity. Strain MF458 was...

Two novel biscembranoids, sarelengans A and B (1 and 2), five new cembranoids, sarelengans C–G (3–7), along with two known cembranoids (8 and 9) were isolated from the South China Sea soft coral Sarcophyton elegans. Their structures were determined b...

An increasing prevalence of diabetes is known as a main risk for human health in the last future worldwide. There is limited evidence on the potential management of type 2 diabetes mellitus using bioactive peptides from marine organisms, besides from...

Neoagarooligosaccharides (NAOs), mainly comprising neoagarotetraose and neoagarohexaose, were prepared by hydrolyzing agar with β-agarase DagA from Streptomyces coelicolor, and the anti-obesity and anti-diabetic effects of NAOs on high-fat diet (HFD)...