ABSTRACT
As more than 70% of the world’s surface is covered by oceans, the wide diversity of marine organisms offer a rich source of natural products, and the importance of marine organisms as a source of novel bioactive substances is growing rapidly. With marine species comprising approximately a half of the total global biodiversity, the sea offers an enormous resource for novel compounds (Aneiros and Garateix, 2004; Barrow and Shahidi, 2008). Moreover, a very different kind of substances has been obtained from marine organisms among other reasons because they are living in a very exigent, competitive, and aggressive surrounding, very different in many aspects from the terrestrial environment, a situation that demands the production of quite specic and potent active molecules. Marine environment contains a source of functional materials, including polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), polysaccharides, essential minerals and vitamins, antioxidants, enzymes, and bioactive peptides (Kim and Wijesekara, 2010; Pomponi, 1999).
