Bioprospecting of Marine and Terrestrial Organisms for New Therapeutics

A special issue of Biomedicines (ISSN 2227-9059). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular and Translational Medicine".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2023) | Viewed by 1167

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
G.B. Elyakov Pacific Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Far Eastern Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, 690022 Vladivostok, Russia
Interests: genomics; phylogeny; biochemistry; genome bioprospecting
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Guest Editor
G.B. Elyakov Pacific Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Far Eastern Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, 159, Pr. 100 let Vladivostoku, Vladivostok 690022, Russia
Interests: marine bioprospecting; sea anemone venoms; combinatorial peptide libraries; recombinant peptides
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Bioprospecting for biologically active natural products is a well-known tool used in the early stages of drug discovery. The choice of a source for bioprospecting plays an important role in research efforts that is more likely to lead to new drugs. Unique ecosystems unexplored to date such as tundra, desert, salt marshes, and groundwater or mangrove forests are valuable sources of novel products. Advances in high-throughput omics technologies such as proteomics, genomics, and metabolomics have offered wide opportunities for bioprospecting and drug discovery, allowing thousands of molecules to be analyzed simultaneously. Marine ecosystems are an untapped reservoir of biodiversity with enormous potential for bioprospecting of pharmacologically active compounds. As Guest Editors of the Special Issue titled “Genomic Bioprospecting of Marine Species for New Therapeutics” we clearly recognize that marine genome-based bioprospecting is a very new trend. However, we are seeing progress in studies of marine natural products from marine microorganisms due to their biosynthetic gene identification and marine venomous animals due to their transcriptomic studies.

As Guest Editors of the updated Special Issue of Biomedicines named "Bioprospecting of Marine and Terrestrial Organisms for New Therapeutics", we would like to invite scientists who deal with marine or terrestrial bioprospecting to make a highly desirable contribution to nature-derived drug discovery.

Dr. Marina P. Isaeva
Dr. Elena Leychenko
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • bioprospecting
  • marine and terrestrial resources
  • drug discovery
  • natural products
  • peptides
  • gene-based screening
  • biosynthetic gene cluster
  • genome mining 

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

13 pages, 2720 KiB  
Article
Bioprospecting of Sea Anemones (Cnidaria, Anthozoa, Actiniaria) for β-Defensin-like α-Amylase Inhibitors
by Daria Popkova, Nadezhda Otstavnykh, Oksana Sintsova, Sergey Baldaev, Rimma Kalina, Irina Gladkikh, Marina Isaeva and Elena Leychenko
Biomedicines 2023, 11(10), 2682; https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines11102682 - 30 Sep 2023
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 800
Abstract
Diabetes mellitus is one of the most serious diseases of our century. The drugs used are limited or have serious side effects. The search for new sources of compounds for effective treatment is relevant. Magnificamide, a peptide inhibitor of mammalian α-amylases, isolated from [...] Read more.
Diabetes mellitus is one of the most serious diseases of our century. The drugs used are limited or have serious side effects. The search for new sources of compounds for effective treatment is relevant. Magnificamide, a peptide inhibitor of mammalian α-amylases, isolated from the venom of sea anemone Heteractis magnifica, can be used for the control of postprandial hyperglycemia in diabetes mellitus. Using the RACE approach, seven isoforms of magnificamide were detected in H. magnifica tentacles. The exon–intron structure of magnificamide genes was first established, and intron retention in the mature peptide-encoding region was revealed. Additionally, an α-amylase inhibitory domain was discovered in the mucins of some sea anemones. According to phylogenetics, sea anemones diverge into two groups depending on the presence of β-defensin-like α-amylase inhibitors and/or mucin-inhibitory domains. It is assumed that the intron retention phenomenon leads to additional diversity in the isoforms of inhibitors and allows for its neofunctionalization in sea anemone tentacles. Bioprospecting of sea anemones of the order Actiniaria for β-defensin-like α-amylase inhibitors revealed a diversity of inhibitory sequences that represents a starting point for the design of effective glucose-lowering drugs. Full article
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