Natural Products from Cyanobacteria: Focus on Beneficial Activities

Abstract

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic microorganisms that colonize diverse environments worldwide, ranging from ocean to freshwaters, soils, and extreme environments. Their adaptation capacities and the diversity of natural products (molecules, metabolites, or compounds) that they synthesize support the cyanobacterial success for the colonization of their respective ecological niches. Although cyanobacteria are well-known for their toxin production and their relative deleterious consequences, they also produce a large variety of molecules that exhibit beneficial properties with high potential for various fields of application (e.g., synthetic analog of the dolastatin 10 used against Hodgkin lymphoma). The present review specially focuses on the beneficial activities of cyanobacterial molecules described so far. Based on an analysis of 670 papers, it appears that more than 90 genera of cyanobacteria have been found to produce compounds with potential beneficial activities, most of them belonging to the orders Oscillatoriales, Nostocales Chroococcales, and Synechococcales. The rest of the cyanobacterial orders (i.e., Pleurocapsales, Chroococcidiopsales, and Gloeobacterales) remain poorly explored in terms of their molecular diversity and relative bioactivity. The diverse cyanobacterial molecules presenting beneficial bioactivities belong to 10 different chemical classes (alkaloids, depsipeptides, lipopeptides, macrolides/lactones, peptides, terpenes, polysaccharides, lipids, polyketides, and others) that exhibit 14 major kinds of bioactivity. However, no direct relation between the chemical class and the bioactivity of these molecules has been demonstrated. We further selected and specifically described 50 molecule families according to their specific bioactivities and their potential uses in pharmacology, cosmetology, agriculture, or other specific fields of interest. This up-to-date review takes advantage of the recent progresses in genome sequencing and biosynthetic pathway elucidation, and presents new perspectives for the rational discovery of new cyanobacterial metabolites with beneficial bioactivity.

Antimicrobial Peptides: a New Frontier in Antifungal Therapy

“…The cyanobacterial genera Lyngbya , Nostoc , and Hassallia produce hassallidins and lyngbyabellins (e.g., hectochlorin), which are two distinct families of cyclic peptides that showed potent activity against C. albicans and C. krusei ( 210 , 211 ). Both of these peptide families have significant toxicity in mammalian cells: hectochlorin hyperpolymerizes actin ( 212 ), while hassallidin A disrupts membranes ( 213 ), and so their potential as therapeutics is limited.…”

Marine Organisms for the Sustainable Management of Plant Parasitic Nematodes

“…The marine cyanobacteria Lyngbya spp. are, to date the most productive source of bioactive cyanobacterial compounds [ 76 ] and show potent anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic and anti-cancer activity [ 19 , 77 ]. In particular, lipopeptides isolated from the cyanobacterium Lyngbia majuscula have shown a spectrum of biological activities consistent with their functioning as defense metabolites, including sodium channel blocking activity and arthropod and fish toxicity [ 78 , 79 ].…”

Draft Genome Sequence of the Toxic Freshwater Microcystis aeruginosa Strain PMC 728.11 (Cyanobacteria, Chroococcales)

“…(B) Phylogram of available Microcystis genomes based on a rapid neighbor-joining algorithm (v1.0.4) using default parameters ( 19 ) with average nucleotide identity (ANI) distances (PMC 728.11 is indicated in bold). (C) Biosynthetic gene clusters and their potential products detected by antiSMASH from a PMC 728.11 genome search, comprising gene clusters producing microcystins, among other bioactive compounds ( 20 ).…”