Bioprospecting and marine ‘omics’ ; surfing the deep blue sea for novel bioactive proteins and peptides

Funding Information: The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Fundo Azul co-financed project MARVEN (FA_05_2017_007). The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), I. P., funded project WormALL (PTDC/BTA-BTA/28650/2017). This work was also financed by the National Funds from FCT in the scope of the project UIDP/04378/2020 and UIDB/04378/2020 of the Research Unit on Applied Molecular Biosciences \u2013 UCIBIO and the project LA/P/0140/2020 of the Associate Laboratory Institute for Health and Bioeconomy \u2013 i4HB. FCT is also acknowledged for the grants SFRH/BD/144914/2019 to CG and 2022.11150.BD to IMC. Acknowledgments Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2024 Moutinho Cabral, Gonçalves, Grosso and Costa. ; The vast biological and biochemical diversity of the global ocean is the driver behind marine bioprospecting for novel bioproducts. As Marine Biotechnology is gaining momentum as one of the main pillars of the ‘Brue Growth’ revolution, the ability to screen for novel compounds of interest in species with little or no genomic resources is paramount. With this respect, proteins, which are easily metabolised, can be synthetised using convenient DNA recombinant methods and can easily be modified to better meet the needs of human society, making them prized targets. Evidently, proteins that hold natural bioactivity and specificity such as toxins and other venom components, have long captured the focus of biotechnologists, leading to the merger between environmental omics and toxinology termed as ‘venomics’. Indeed, bioactive proteins such as conopeptides, conotoxins, turripeptides and others are long deemed important subjects of research. Even though current mainstream paradigms set the focus on secondary metabolites from marine organisms, transcriptomics and proteomics approaches and their combination are rising strategies for screening for thousands of proteins and peptides in non-conventional biological models, emphasising, ...