Co-Culture as the Novel Approach for Drug Discovery from Marine Environment

Marine ecosystem is the bountiful source of pharmacologically relevant compounds. The enhanced productivity of this ecosystem is contributed mainly by the marine invertebrates. Though there is a serious problem of compound supply from these invertebrates, total synthesis and semi-synthesis efforts of the known compounds has helped us to simplify the problem. Another approach to enhance these compound productions is based on the microbes associated with them. Identification, extraction, genomic mining and co-culture approaches of these microbes will help us to meet the economic feasibility of the active principle or the bioactive metabolite. In this review, we come across the co-culture approaches of drug discovery from the marine environment.