Diversity and biogeography of marine actinobacteria

The actinomycetes, although not all the Actinobacteria, are easy to isolate from the marine environment. However, their ecological role in the marine ecosystem is largely neglected and various assumptions meant there was little incentive to isolate strains for search and discovery of new drugs. However, the marine environment has become a prime resource in search and discovery for novel natural products and biological diversity, and marine actinomycetes turn out to be important contributors. Similarly, striking advances have been made in marine microbial ecology using molecular techniques and metagenomics, and actinobacteria emerge as an often significant, sometimes even dominant, environmental clade. Both approaches — cultivation methods and molecular techniques — are leading to new insights into marine actinobacterial biodiversity and biogeography. Very different views of actinobacterial diversity emerge from these, however, and the true extent and biogeography of this are still not clear. These are important for developing natural product search and discovery strategies, and biogeography is a hot topic for microbial ecologists.