The subject of this review is the biodiversity of marine sponges and associated microbes which have been reported to produce therapeutically important compounds, along with the contextual information on their geographic distribution. Class Demospongiae and the orders Halichondrida, Poecilosclerida and Dictyoceratida are the richest sources of these compounds. Among the microbial associates, members of the bacterial phylum Actinobacteria and fungal division Ascomycota have been identified to be the dominant producers of therapeutics. Though the number of bacterial associates outnumber the fungal associates, the documented potential of fungi to produce clinically active compounds is currently more important than that of bacteria. Interestingly, production of a few identical compounds by entirely different host-microbial associations has been detected in both terrestrial and marine environments. In the Demospongiae, microbial association is highly specific and so to the production of compounds. Besides, persistent production of bioactive compounds has also been encountered in highly specific host-symbiont associations. Though spatial and temporal variations are known to have a marked effect on the quality and quantity of bioactive compounds, only a few studies have covered these dimensions. The need to augment production of these compounds through tissue culture and mariculture has also been stressed. The reviewed database of these compounds is available at www.niobioinformatics.in/drug.php.

Abstract. Cataloguing biological specimen is an important activity of biological museums world over. Software developed especially for this purpose has evolved over time to achieve more accuracy in retrieving data from large and diverse datasets. Combining smaller datasets into a larger information system requires uniformity of data based on a single data standard. In the developing world smaller datasets are maintained by individual researchers or small college and university groups. To standardize data from such datasets software needs to be developed, requiring expertise and sufficient funds which are often unavailable. We present a simple open source web based tool developed using PHP to enable an individual, with little or no knowledge of information systems or databases, to effectively streamline specimen data with data standard Darwin Core 1.2 ( DwC 1.2). Such data can then be shared and easily provided to data aggregators like Ocean Biogeographic Information Systems (OBIS -http://www.iobis.org ) and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF -http://www.gbif.org). This tool can be accessed at http://www.niobioinformatics.in/digimus.php and its source code is freely available at http://www.niobioinformatics.in/digimus_source.php.