Submissions Now Open for Special Issue of Marine Drugs
MARBLES researcher Stephen Jackson (University College Cork (UCC)) will be Guest Editor for a Special Issue of Marine Drugs entitled 'Exploiting Marine 'Omics' Technologies for the Biodiscovery of Marine Natural Products with Activity Against Fish Diseases'. Submissions of Research Articles and Review Articles for the issue are now open with the deadline 31 December 2023.
The marine environment is host to taxonomically diverse planktonic microorganisms and microbes closely associated in amensal or commensal relationships with higher organisms such as plants and animals. Certain bacterial taxa are antagonistic to fish health, causing diseases such as hemorrhagic septicemia, furunculosis, and vibriosis. Incidences and the prevalence of fish diseases have significant impacts on sustainable food production. New antimicrobial agents are needed to suppress bacterial fish diseases, to reduce the economic impacts of fish diseases, and to combat the spread of antimicrobial resistance in fish pathogens globally. This Special Issue plans to highlight multi-'omics' strategies being employed to discover novel marine natural products with the potential to tackle fish pathogen virulence, to identify new probiotic marine microbial species or consortia with bioprotective effects for the host, and to reduce the prophylactic over-use of antibiotics in marine ecosystems.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Genomics of marine microbes with a focus on bioactive secondary metabolites;
- Metagenomics of marine microbial consortia;
- Metabolomics of bioactive marine microbes;
- Multi-omics approaches to realize the potential of cryptic secondary metabolism biosynthetic gene clusters;
- Probiotics as bioprotective agents in marine ecosystems;
- The antibiotic resistome of fish pathogens.