Biodiversity marine organism

Such losses are potentially serious problems for drug research. Maintaining biodiversity is an essential component of future research efforts to identify possible drugs in the world s plant and marine resources. Scientists have no idea how many species there are in the world, but reasonable estimates place the numbers at about 250,000 plant species and up to 1 million marine species. So far, no more than about 10 percent of all plants and 1 percent of all marine organisms have been studied for possible use as drugs. 

Marine organisms represent a valuable source of nutraceuticals and functional compounds. The biodiversity of the marine environment and the associated chemical diversity constitute a practically unlimited resource of novel active substances for the development of bioactive products. Recently, a great deal of interest has been expressed in marine-derived bioactive peptides because of their numerous beneficial health effects. Moreover, several studies have reported that marine bioactive peptides can be used as... 

When the impact of process scale is viewed from the planetary boundaries perspective, the inherent multicriteria nature of any sustainability assessment is indispensable. Even when only environmental LCA impacts are accounted for, studies have shown that certain boundaries have been crossed or are very close to the limit (i.e., with respect to climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen and phosphorous cycles), while others are stiU reasonably well safeguarded (i.e., stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, and freshwater use) [64]. It is therefore possible that different production sectors may have an impact on different planetary boundaries some of which may be within or already outside their safe operating space. For instance, studies have indicated the severe impacts of plastic debris on marine organisms [65]. Thus, from a cradle-to-grave LCA perspective, fossil-based plastics production may have a more direct or at least a different kind of effect in terms of biodiversity compared to fossil-based fuel production, which is certainly in higher production scales. 

Fisheries scientists continue to explore aquatic and marine bioresources for pharmaceuticals, nutra-ceuticals, and novel biomaterials as well as investigate distribution and biodiversity of marine organisms important to industrial utilization. In finding innovative uses for aquatic and marine products and thereby increasing the value of specific fish stocks, fisheries scientists also make more likely the prospect that a given stock will be more sustainably harvested over the long term. 

Although marine organisms have been used in medicine in China since ancient times, their use remains restricted because there is very little oral tradition or any traditional pharmacopoeia referring to algae, invertebrates or fish outside China, or at least outside the Far East. A systematic study of marine biodiversity for therapeutic purposes only really started in the second half of the twentieth century and immediately engendered a great deal of interest, thanks to the discovery, possibly fortuitous, of some rare and active molecules. 

Along with considerable biodiversity comes a corresponding degree of chemodiversity. Table 4.2 shows the number of publications and the number of isolated molecules for the main phyla. It is thus a fairly precise numerical translation (no database being perfect) of the amount of interest expressed by researchers in the principal groups of marine organisms. 

Quinn, R.J., de Almeida Leone, P., Guymer, G., and Hooper, J.N.A. (2002) Australian biodiversity via its plants and marine organisms a high-throughput screening approach to drug discovery. Pure Appl. Chem., 74, 519-526. 

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