Marine metabolomics for bioactive material discovery: current trends, challenges, and future perspectives

INTRODUCTION: Marine metabolomics has emerged as a powerful approach for elucidating the chemical basis of marine biodiversity, ecological interactions, and organismal responses to environmental change. By profiling low-molecular-weight metabolites, it provides a functional link between genotype, phenotype, and environment. AREAS COVERED: This review is based on a structured survey of literature published from 2015 to 2025, retrieved from major scientific databases including Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, using keywords related to marine metabolomics, mass spectrometry, and chemical ecology, and focusing on peer-reviewed studies. This review synthesizes recent advances and core challenges in marine metabolomics. Specifically, the authors emphasize the strong context dependence of metabolite expression spatial, temporal, and ecological scales, driven by environmental heterogeneity, biological interactions, and exposure history. EXPERT OPINION: Despite significant methodological progress, the field continues to face persistent bottlenecks across the research pipeline, including preservation of in situ metabolic states during sampling, severe matrix interference, limited structural annotation of marine-specific metabolites, challenges in ecologically relevant functional validation, and difficulties in translating laboratory findings into real-world applications. Emerging integrated strategies, including multidimensional mass spectrometry, advanced data analytics, stable isotope tracing, spatial metabolomics, and ecologically realistic experimental systems, are highlighted as key pathways to improve structural resolution, functional interpretation, causal inference, and translational robustness.