marine drugs Review Natural Products from Cyanobacteria: Focus on Beneficial Activities Justine Demay 1,2 ,Cécile Bernard 1,* , Anita Reinhardt 2 and Benjamin Marie 1 1 UMR 7245 MCAM, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle-CNRS, Paris, 12 rue Buffon, CP 39, 75231 Paris CEDEX 05, France;
[email protected] (J.D.);
[email protected] (B.M.) 2 Thermes de Balaruc-les-Bains, 1 rue du Mont Saint-Clair BP 45, 34540 Balaruc-Les-Bains, France;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +33-1-40-79-31-83/95 Received: 15 April 2019; Accepted: 21 May 2019; Published: 30 May 2019 Abstract: Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic microorganisms that colonize diverse environments worldwide, ranging from ocean to freshwaters, soils, and extreme environments. Their adaptation capacities and the diversity of natural products that they synthesize, support cyanobacterial success in colonization of their respective ecological niches. Although cyanobacteria are well-known for their toxin production and their relative deleterious consequences, they also produce a large variety of molecules that exhibit beneficial properties with high potential in various fields (e.g., a synthetic analog of dolastatin 10 is used against Hodgkin’s lymphoma). The present review focuses on the beneficial activities of cyanobacterial molecules described so far. Based on an analysis of 670 papers, it appears that more than 90 genera of cyanobacteria have been observed to produce compounds with potentially beneficial activities in which most of them belong to the orders Oscillatoriales, Nostocales, Chroococcales, and Synechococcales. The rest of the cyanobacterial orders (i.e., Pleurocapsales, Chroococcidiopsales, and Gloeobacterales) remain poorly explored in terms of their molecular diversity and relative bioactivity.