Marine microorganisms have drawn great attention as novel bioactive natural product sources, particularly in the drug discovery area. Using different strategies, marine microbes have the ability to produce a wide variety of molecules. One of these strategies is the co-culturing of marine microbes; if two or more microorganisms are aseptically cultured together in a solid or liquid medium in a certain environment, their competition or synergetic relationship can activate the silent biosynthetic genes to produce cryptic natural products which do not exist in monocultures of the partner microbes. In recent years, the co-cultivation strategy of marine microbes has made more novel natural products with various biological activities. This review focuses on the significant and excellent examples covering sources, types, structures and bioactivities of secondary metabolites based on co-cultures of marine-derived microorganisms from 2009 to 2019. A detailed discussion on future prospects and current challenges in the field of co-culture is also provided on behalf of the authors' own views of development tendencies.
Keywords: biological activities; co-culture; marine microbes; natural products; structural diversity.