It is acknowledged that marine invertebrates produce bioactive natural products that may be useful for developing new drugs. By exploring untapped geographical sources and/or novel groups of organisms one can maximize the search for new marine drugs to treat human diseases. The goal of this paper is to analyse the trends associated with the discovery of new marine natural products from inverteb...

Lactic acid bacteria have been used for many years as natural bio preservatives in fermented foods and are also believed to have beneficial health effects on the host. However selection of strain is an important criteria which is mainly based on evaluating the physiological properties of the strain. In this study, lactic acid bacteria were isolated from various dairy, non-dairy and human source...

BACKGROUND Heterologous expression of bacterial biosynthetic gene clusters is currently an indispensable tool for characterizing biosynthetic pathways. Development of an effective, general heterologous expression system that can be applied to bioprospecting from metagenomic DNA will enable the discovery of a wealth of new natural products. METHODOLOGY We have developed a new Escherichia coli-...

Background Deposition of new genetic sequences in online databases is expanding at an unprecedented rate. As a result, sequence identification continues to outpace functional characterization of carbohydrate active enzymes (CAZymes). In this paradigm, the discovery of enzymes with novel functions is often hindered by high volumes of uncharacterized sequences particularly when the enzyme sequenc...