ABSTRACT
Recently, high-throughput screening like genome-based bioinformatics tools is used to design new bioactive compounds. In spite of these technological advances, the number of new entities reaching the market has declined from 53 to only 26 within a time span (1996-2005) of 9 years (Singh et al., 2011). As a result, insufcient numbers of new
12.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 203 12.2 Cyanobacteria ..................................................................................................................... 204 12.3 Marine cyanobacteria as a source of natural products ................................................ 205 12.4 Bioactive antimicrobial compounds from marine cyanobacteria .............................. 207
12.4.1 Antibacterial activity ............................................................................................. 207 12.4.2 Antifungal activity of cyanobacteria .................................................................. 210 12.4.3 Antiprotozoan metabolites ................................................................................... 213 12.4.4 Antiviral activity .................................................................................................... 214 12.4.5 Antiquorum compounds ...................................................................................... 217
12.5 Screening of bioactive compounds from cyanobacteria .............................................. 218 12.6 Biosynthetic genes for secondary metabolites ............................................................... 220 12.7 Barbamide biosynthetic pathway ....................................................................................222 12.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 224 References ..................................................................................................................................... 224
therapeutic drugs are available in the market. To fulll the demand for new therapeutic drugs, scientists have been searching novel bioactive compounds from microbial origin. Among the producers of commercially important metabolites, cyanobacteria have proven to be a prolic source for the vast majority of compounds discovered until now (Burja et al., 2001; Kumar et al., 2013). In this chapter, we have made an attempt to consolidate the recent researches in the eld of cyanobacterial bioactive metabolites as antibiotic, antifungal, antimalarial, antiviral, and anti-quorum sensing activities.
