Bioactive Molecules from Extreme Environments

Abstract

Marine organisms inhabiting extreme habitats are a promising reservoir of bioactive compounds for drug discovery. Extreme environments, i.e., polar and hot regions, deep sea, hydrothermal vents, marine areas of high pressure or high salinity, experience conditions close to the limit of life. In these marine ecosystems, “hot spots” of biodiversity, organisms have adopted a huge variety of strategies to cope with such harsh conditions, such as the production of bioactive molecules potentially valuable for biotechnological applications and for pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmeceutical sectors. Many enzymes isolated from extreme environments may be of great interest in the detergent, textile, paper and food industries. Marine natural products produced by organisms evolved under hostile conditions exhibit a wide structural diversity and biological activities. In fact, they exert antimicrobial, anticancer, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. The aim of this Special Issue “Bioactive Molecules from Extreme Environments” was to provide the most recent findings on bioactive molecules as well as enzymes isolated from extreme environments, to be used in biotechnological discovery pipelines and pharmaceutical applications, in an effort to encourage further research in these extreme habitats.

A Meat-Derived Lactic Acid Bacteria, Lactobacillus plantarum IIA, Expresses a Functional Parvulin-Like Protein with Unique Structural Property

“…LAB is considerably a group of extreme bacteria due to their survival capability at a very low pH (Mbye et al, 2020) stress implied that those organisms are equipped with supporting cellular machinery, including proteins or enzymes (Giordano, 2020). As an example, LAB is known to have a very efficient proton pump allowing the bacteria to maintain their intracellular pH under very low environmental pH (Wang et al, 2018).…”

Unexplored potential: Biologically active compounds produced by microorganisms from hard-to-reach environments and their applications

“…The synthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) by the Gram-negative Pseudomonas strain, isolated from the Antarctic marine ciliate Euplotes focardii, and showing antimicrobial activities against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Candida albicans was reported (John et al, 2020). Silver nanoparticles were obtained by incubation of Pseudomonas cultures with silver nitrate (AgNO 3 ), and after that antimicrobial activity was tested against 12 human pathogens by using disk diffusion method (DDM) giving promising results (John et al, 2020;Giordano, 2020).…”

Bioactivity Screening of Antarctic Sponges Reveals Anticancer Activity and Potential Cell Death via Ferroptosis by Mycalols

“…For example, a longer period of larval development has been observed for sponges in Antarctica [ 10 ], where they represent the major component of the Antarctic zoobenthos (counting about 400 species; [ 10 , 11 ]). Previous studies have shown that Antarctic sponges may produce bioactive compounds for possible human applications [ 2 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ]. This study aims to further explore the Antarctic region and to give an overview of sponge bioactivity from different sites, their chemical composition, and the mechanism of action of the active principles.…”