Evaluation of a microbial marine natural product as a potential proteasome inhibitor and its anti-cancer effects

. Then a proteasome activity assay was performed after exposure of MCF-7 breast cancer cells to marinacarboline C, together with a positive control (MG-132). However, marinacarboline C was found to not significantly decrease the 20S proteasome activity of MCF-7 cells. Cblaster was used to find homologous biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) to that producing marinacarboline C, to expand future research and identify microbes possibly producing similar NPs. Our study offers a proof-of-concept pipeline for mining NPs for activity against novel targets and further validation is needed to bring forward more NPs. Our integrated approach paves the way to identify promising natural-product scaffolds for further optimization as potential anticancer agents.