Marine Microbial Chemical Biology
The deep ocean microbiome lives in a highly competitive consortium where microorganisms constantly interact and subsequently produce secondary metabolites in order to sustain and survive at their ecological niche. They are known to belong to novel taxa and have different biosynthetic gene pools compared to their terrestrial soil microbial counterparts. These attributes indicate that the secondary metabolites discovered from them hold novelty and promise in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The search for bioactive metabolites from marine microbes is still in its infancy and demonstrates that the microbiome of the marine environments offers a vast and untapped resource for therapeutic leads. Clearly, with the recent discoveries of new chemical entities from a tiny subset of an enormously diverse life in marine environment, microbes are likely to offer many tens or hundreds of thousands of novel and biologically active compounds.