Considering that 70% of our planet's surface is covered by oceans, it is likely that undiscovered biodiversity is still enormous. A large portion of marine biodiversity consists of microbiomes. They are very attractive targets of bioprospecting because they are able to produce a vast repertoire of secondary metabolites in order to adapt in diverse environments. In many cases secondary metabolites of pharmaceutical and biotechnological interest such as nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) and polyketides (PKs) are synthesized by multimodular enzymes named nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSes) and type-I polyketide synthases (PKSes-I), respectively. Novel findings regarding the mechanisms underlying NRPS and PKS evolution demonstrate how microorganisms could leverage their metabolic potential. Moreover, these findings could facilitate synthetic biology approaches leading to novel bioactive compounds. Ongoing advances in bioinformatics and next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies are driving the discovery of NRPs and PKs derived from marine microbiomes mainly through two strategies: genome-mining and metagenomics. Microbial genomes are now sequenced at an unprecedented rate and this vast quantity of biological information can be analyzed through genome mining in order to identify gene clusters encoding NRPSes and PKSes of interest. On the other hand, metagenomics is a fast-growing research field which directly studies microbial genomes and their products present in marine environments using culture-independent approaches. The aim of this review is to examine recent developments regarding discovery strategies of bioactive compounds synthesized by NRPS and type-I PKS derived from marine microbiomes and to highlight the vast diversity of NRPSes and PKSes present in marine environments by giving examples of recently discovered bioactive compounds.
Keywords: bioactive compounds; bioprospecting; evolution; genome mining; marine microbiomes; metagenomics; nonribosomal peptide synthetase; polyketide synthase.