Extraction, Characterization, and Anticoagulant Activity of a Sulfated Polysaccharide from Bursatella leachii Viscera

Bioactive compounds for drug discovery are increasingly extracted and purified from natural sources including marine organisms. Heparin is a therapeutic agent that has been used for several decades as an anticoagulant. However, heparin is known to cause many undesirable complications such as thrombocytopenia and risk of hemorrhage. Hence, there is a need to find alternatives to current widely used anticoagulant drugs. Here, we extract a sulfated polysaccharide from sea hare, that is, Bursatella leachii viscera, by enzymatic digestion. Several analytical approaches including elemental analysis, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis show that B. leachii polysaccharides have chemical structures similar to glycosaminoglycans. We explore the anticoagulant activity of the B. leachii extract using the activated partial thromboplastin time and the thrombin time. Our results demonstrate that the extracted sulfated polysaccharide has heparin-like anticoagulant activity, thus showing great promise as an alternative anticoagulant therapy.

Marine Natural Products from the Yucatan Peninsula

Mexico is one of the three areas of the world with the greatest terrestrial and cultural biological diversity. The diversity of Mexican medicinal flora has been studied for a long time and several bioactive compounds have been isolated. The investigation of marine resources, and particularly the potential of Mexican marine resources, has not been intensively investigated, even though the Yucatan Peninsula occupies 17.4% of the total of the Mexican coast, with great biological diversity in its coasts and the ocean. There are very few studies on the chemistry of natural products from marine organisms that were collected along the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula and most of them are limited to the evaluation of the biological activity of their organic extracts. The investigations carried out on marine species from the Yucatan Peninsula resulted in the identification of a wide structural variety of natural products that include polyketides, terpenoids, nitrogen compounds, and biopolymers with cytotoxic, antibacterial, antifouling, and neurotoxic activities. This review describes the literature of bioprospecting and the exploration of the natural product diversity of marine organisms from the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula up to mid-2019.