Novel Insights on the Symbiotic Interactions of Marine Sponge-Associated Microorganisms: Marine Microbial Biotechnology Perspective

Marine sponges are the most dominant group responsible for discovering a large number of natural products that have been used as template to develop therapeutic drugs. These natural products have a wide range of therapeutic properties, including antimicrobial, antioxidant, antihypertensive, anticoagulant, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, wound healing, and immune modulators. Marine sponges and their symbionts are the most primitive of the multicellular organisms, produce a plethora of secondary metabolites, and accumulate large populations of microbes within the mesohyl. These microbes are believed to exist as both intracellular and extracellular symbionts and have been proposed to be involved in matrix stabilization, waste processing, and producing secondary metabolites for defense. Many of bioactive compounds are secreted by sponge-associated microbes, such as bacteria, fungi, blue-green algae, and actinomycetes. It includes antibiotics, peptides and non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs), polyketides, enzymes, quinones and quinolone derivatives, alkaloids, and pigments. In the present review, we highlighted the new developments in the field of marine sponge metabolite research and symbiotic and functional interactions between associated microbes and host sponges and its potentials in microbial biotechnology approaches.