Diversity and Utilization of Marine Cyanobacteria

This chapter focuses on the biodiversity of cyanobacteria in marine environments of India and future research priorities and opportunities in the commercial utilization in varied areas such as mariculture, food, feed, fertilizer, medicine, industry and combating pollution. The basic and fundamental requirement for initiating marine cyanobacterial biotechnology is to first enumerate the available cyanobacterial diversity and understand their ecobiological properties. Cyanobacteria are one of the largest sub-groups of Gram-negative photosynthetic autotrophic prokaryotes. There are two major morphological types of cyanobacteria: coccoid and filamentous forms. Cyanobacteria are one of the potential organisms which can be useful to mankind in various ways. Cyanobacteria in general and marine forms in particular are the richest sources of known and novel bioactive compounds including toxins with wide pharmaceutical applications. A good amount of work has been carried out to bring out the nanobiotechnological potential of cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria have long been considered either as organisms of academic curiosity or as organisms of nuisance value.