A study by researchers from CIIMAR, in collaboration with Fundacíon Medina, in Spain, opens another door in the discovery of new natural products in actinobacteria.
A study by researchers from CIIMAR, in collaboration with Fundacíon Medina, in Spain, opens another door in the discovery of new natural products in actinobacteria. The study was selected for the cover of the latest edition of the journal Marine Drugs, well-known in the field of marine natural products.
Actinobacteria are already known by the scientific community for their high capacity to produce bioactive compounds which, when properly exploited by biotechnology, can be useful for various applications ranging from health, cosmetics, industry, and agriculture.
The work “Cellulamides: A New Family of Marine-Sourced Linear Peptides from the Underexplored Cellulosimicrobium Genus” primarily resulted in the discovery of a new family of natural compounds, cellulamides, produced by a genus of actinobacteria from which no natural product had ever been reported, the genus Cellulosimicrobium. The scientific article now published in Marine Drugs was the result of the work of the PhD student Mariana Girão, supervised by CIIMAR researchers Fátima Carvalho, Pedro Leão, and Ralph Urbatzka.
A discovery of dual importance
This discovery is of dual importance since it “introduces two highly relevant elements: a new family of peptides that can now be explored for various biotechnological applications and a genus of actinobacteria, Cellulosimicrobium, hitherto unexplored in terms of natural product production, which has shown effective capacity to produce new molecules,” says Fátima Carvalho, leader of CIIMAR’s Microbial Biodegradation and Bioprospecting team.
The work can open new doors for the biotechnology field, which now has two new marine-derived molecules to explore. Mariana Girão asserts that “this work not only highlights that marine ecosystems are a valuable source of unexplored bacteria and new molecules but also underlines the relevance of marine biotechnology in the search for new compounds with biotechnological applications.”
