@inproceedings{8745616,
  abstract     = {{Natural products have been associated with human medicine for many ages and have been gaining increasing attention in the past decades. Marine ecosystems, known for their versatile environmental conditions, are a prevalent source of Actinobacteria, which harbor many specialized molecules. With a plethora of unique secondary metabolites, the marine environment possesses an up to four times higher success rate in drug discovery, yet, marine natural products are still underrepresented compared to terrestrial environments. Specifically, alkaloids have proven to be pharmaceutically interesting compounds. Here, an overview of 77 newly discovered alkaloids produced by marine Actinobacteria between 2017 and mid-2021 is given, followed by a discussion about the strategies employed in their elucidation. To unravel these metabolites, microbial extraction and chemical structure identification with methods such as LC-MS and NMR was mainly used. Although such experimental procedures have proven useful in the past, these methodologies need adaptations to limit the likelihood of compound rediscovery. Besides extract screening, novel technologies such as genome mining showed promising results in unraveling new natural products. Moreover, the knowledge obtained by genome mining approaches aids the discovery of novel alkaloids from marine Actinobacteria as well as allows the use of synthetic biology tools for the production of marine alkaloids. 

The findings obtained in this study have been published at Marine Drugs 2022, 20(1), 6: https://doi.org/10.3390/md20010006}},
  author       = {{Rombaut, Jeltien and De Rop, Anne-Sofie and Willems, Thomas and De Graeve, Marilyn and Vanhaecke, Lynn and Hulpiau, Paco and De Maeseneire, Sofie and De Mol, Maarten and Soetaert, Wim}},
  booktitle    = {{Annual Symposium of the Belgian Society for Microbiology, Abstracts}},
  keywords     = {{Marine Actinobacteria,Alkaloids,Chemical Structure Elucidation,Genome Mining,Synthetic Biology}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  location     = {{Brussels, Belgium}},
  title        = {{Discovery and structure elucidation of novel alkaloids from marine actinobacteria}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}