Natural Products and Bioactivity of Marine Cyanobacteria

Marine cyanobacteria, among the oldest photosynthetic organisms on Earth, are prolific producers of structurally diverse secondary metabolites. These include peptides, polyketides, alkaloids, terpenes and lipids, many of which display potent bioactivities such as anticancer, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral and enzyme‐inhibitory effects. Advances in genomics and metabolomics have revealed widespread gene clusters encoding non‐ribosomal peptide synthases and polyketide synthases, underpinning the remarkable chemical diversity found in genera such as Oscillatoria, Lyngbya and Nostoc. The unique environmental pressures of marine habitats drive cyanobacterial adaptation and the evolution of novel scaffolds, offering lead compounds for pharmaceutical, agricultural and cosmetic applications. Integration of high-resolution mass spectrometry, two-dimensional NMR and bioinformatic dereplication workflows has accelerated the discovery pipeline, enabling rapid identification and characterisation of known and new metabolites. Globally, this research has led to synthetic analogues entering clinical evaluation, highlighting marine cyanobacteria as a sustainable resource for next-generation bioactives.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent advances have applied a deep learning–enhanced NMR dereplication platform to marine cyanobacterial extracts, significantly improving the speed and accuracy of known compound identification. By integrating non-uniform sampling two-dimensional heteronuclear NMR with convolutional neural networks, this approach reconstructs high-fidelity spectral data from reduced sampling points and automates clustering against spectral libraries. The result is a streamlined pipeline that prioritises novel scaffolds for isolation, thereby reducing redundant efforts and expediting the characterisation of previously unreported natural products.

Natural Products and Bioactivity of Marine Cyanobacteria publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in natural products and bioactivity of marine cyanobacteria across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Depsipeptide: A hybrid natural product comprising amino acid and hydroxy acid residues linked through both amide and ester bonds, often with potent biological activities.

Non-ribosomal peptide synthase (NRPS): A modular enzyme complex that assembles diverse peptides independently of the ribosome, generating many marine cyanobacterial metabolites.

Dereplication: A rapid screening process used to identify known compounds in complex mixtures, avoiding repeated characterisation of previously described natural products.

Convolutional neural network (CNN): A class of deep learning algorithms designed to process grid-like data such as NMR spectra, enabling automated pattern recognition and classification.

Non-uniform sampling (NUS): An NMR acquisition technique that collects a subset of data points in indirect dimensions to reduce experiment time while preserving critical spectral information.

References

1. Marine Organisms as a Prolific Source of Bioactive Depsipeptides. Marine Drugs (2023).
2. Nonribosomal Peptides from Marine Microbes and Their Antimicrobial and Anticancer Potential. Frontiers in Pharmacology (2017).
3. Structural Diversity, Biological Properties and Applications of Natural Products from Cyanobacteria. A Review †. Marine Drugs (2017).
4. Cyanobacteria—From the Oceans to the Potential Biotechnological and Biomedical Applications. Marine Drugs (2021).
5. Marine Cyanobacteria and Microalgae Metabolites—A Rich Source of Potential Anticancer Drugs. Marine Drugs (2020).
6. Marine Cyanobacteria: A Source of Lead Compounds and their Clinically-Relevant Molecular Targets. Molecules (2020).