Coastal countries have traditionally relied on the existing marine resources (e.g., fishing, food, transport, recreation, and tourism) as well as tried to support new economic endeavors (ocean energy, desalination for water supply, and seabed mining). Modern societies and lifestyle resulted in an increased demand for dietary diversity, better health and well-being, new biomedicines, natural cosmeceuticals, environmental conservation, and sustainable energy sources. These societal needs stimulated the interest of researchers on the diverse and underexplored marine environments as promising and sustainable sources of biomolecules and biomass, and they are addressed by the emerging field of marine (blue) biotechnology. Blue biotechnology provides opportunities for a wide range of initiatives of commercial interest for the pharmaceutical, biomedical, cosmetic, nutraceutical, food, feed, agricultural, and related industries. This article synthesizes the essence, opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges encountered in marine biotechnology and outlines the attainment and valorization of directly derived or bio-inspired products from marine organisms. First, the concept of bioeconomy is introduced. Then, the diversity of marine bioresources including an overview of the most prominent marine organisms and their potential for biotechnological uses are described. This is followed by introducing methodologies for exploration of these resources and the main use case scenarios in energy, food and feed, agronomy, bioremediation and climate change, cosmeceuticals, bio-inspired materials, healthcare, and well-being sectors. The key aspects in the fields of legislation and funding are provided, with the emphasis on the importance of communication and stakeholder engagement at all levels of biotechnology development. Finally, vital overarching concepts, such as the quadruple helix and Responsible Research and Innovation principle are highlighted as important to follow within the marine biotechnology field. The authors of this review are collaborating under the European Commission-funded Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action Ocean4Biotech – European transdisciplinary networking platform for marine biotechnology and focus the study on the European state of affairs.

The development of tolerance in Pseudomonas putida DOT-T1 to toluene and related highly toxic compounds involves short- and long-term responses. The short-term response is based on an increase in the rigidity of the cell membrane by rapid transformation of the fatty acid cis-9,10-methylene hexadecanoic acid (C17:cyclopropane) to unsaturated 9-cis-hexadecenoic acid (C16:1,9 cis) and subsequent transformation to the trans isomer. The long-term response involves in addition to the changes in fatty acids, alterations in the level of the phospholipid polar head groups: cardiolipin increases and phosphatidylethanolamine decreases. The two alterations lead to increased cell membrane rigidity and should be regarded as physical mechanisms that prevent solvent penetrance. Biochemical mechanisms that decrease the concentration of toluene in the cell membrane also take place and involve: (i) a solvent exclusion system and (ii) metabolic removal of toluene via oxidation. Mutants unable to carry out cis → trans isomerization of unsaturated lipids, that exhibit altered cell envelopes because of the lack of the OprL protein, or that are unable to exclude toluene from cell membranes are hypersensitive to toluene.

Natural Products (NP) are essential for the discovery of novel drugs and products for numerous biotechnological applications. The NP discovery process is expensive and time-consuming, having as major hurdles dereplication (early identification of known compounds) and structure elucidation, particularly the determination of the absolute configuration of metabolites with stereogenic centers. This review comprehensively focuses on recent technological and instrumental advances, highlighting the development of methods that alleviate these obstacles, paving the way for accelerating NP discovery towards biotechnological applications. Herein, we emphasize the most innovative high-throughput tools and methods for advancing bioactivity screening, NP chemical analysis, dereplication, metabolite profiling, metabolomics, genome sequencing and/or genomics approaches, databases, bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and three-dimensional NP structure elucidation.

Marine organisms possess the capacity to produce a variety of unique and biologically potent natural products for treating human diseases, many of which are currently commercially available or are in advanced clinical trials. Here we provide a short review on progress in the field and discuss a case study of an EU-funded project, PharmaSea, which aims to discover novel products for the treatment of infections, inflammation and neurodegenerative diseases. Research in this sector is opening new doors for harnessing the potential of marine natural products with pharmaceutical properties.

Drug discovery from marine natural products has experienced a revival since the beginning of this century. To be successful in this field, rapid dereplication (identification of already known bioactive compounds) is essential in order to assess the chemical novelty of crude extracts and their fractions. Access to the appropriate state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation and to suitable databases is a fundamental requirement in such a task. A brief survey of the most robust LC/UV/MS- and NMR-based approaches employed for marine natural product dereplication is presented alongside a description of the procedures followed to achieve this goal in our research group.