title: Coral aquaculture to support drug discovery.
abstract: Marine natural products (NP) are unanimously acknowledged as the 'blue gold' in the urgent quest for new pharmaceuticals. Although corals are among the marine organisms with the greatest diversity of secondary metabolites, growing evidence suggest that their symbiotic bacteria produce most of these bioactive metabolites. The ex hospite culture of coral symbiotic microbiota is extremely challenging and only limited examples of successful culture exist today. By contrast, in toto aquaculture of corals is a commonly applied technology to produce corals for aquaria. Here, we suggest that coral aquaculture could as well be a viable and economically feasible option to produce the biomass required to execute the first steps of the NP-based drug discovery pipeline.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Biologia and CESAM, University of Aveiro, Campus de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal; Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, 10 Ocean Science Circle, Savannah, GA 31411, USA. Electronic address: miguelcleal@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Miguel C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Leal
authors.forename: Ricardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Calado
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sheridan
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Alimonti
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Osinga
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D037421:Anthozoa / Q000254:growth & development*; D017756:Aquaculture / Q000379:methods*; D001688:Biological Products / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D001709:Biotechnology / Q000379:methods; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D001688:Biological Products
keywords: Cnidaria; bioactive compounds; biomass supply; economic feasibility; microbiota