Abstract
Marine environments are underexplored terrains containing fungi that produce a diversity of natural products given unique environmental pressures and nutrients. While bacteria are commonly the most studied microorganism for natural products in the marine world, marine fungi are also abundant but remain an untapped source of bioactive metabolites. Given that their terrestrial counterparts have been a source of many blockbuster antitumor agents and anti-infectives, including camptothecin, the penicillins, and cyclosporin A, marine fungi also have the potential to produce new chemical scaffolds as leads to potential drugs. Fungi are more phylogenetically diverse than bacteria and have larger genomes that contain many silent biosynthetic gene clusters involved in making bioactive compounds. However, less than 5% of all known fungi have been cultivated under standard laboratory conditions. While the number of reported natural products from marine fungi is steadily increasing, their number is still significantly lower compared to those reported from their bacterial counterparts. Herein, we discuss many varied cytotoxic and anti-infective fungal metabolites isolated from extreme marine environments, including symbiotic associations as well as extreme pressures, temperatures, salinity, and light. We also discuss cultivation strategies that can be used to produce new bioactive metabolites or increase their production. This review presents a large number of reported structures though, at times, only a few of a large number of related structures are shown.
Highlights
Natural products have been a rich source of therapeutics since the beginning of civilization
To date, ~60% of all small-molecule drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or their equivalent in other countries, have been inspired by these secondary metabolites [1]
This review aims to highlight the bioactive metabolites found from culturable fungi isolated from marine environments and cultivation methods that have been found to increase the production of diverse bioactive metabolites
Summary
Natural products have been a rich source of therapeutics since the beginning of civilization. Microbes constitute much of the biomass in the sea and are prominent producers of secondary metabolites, with a wide range of potent bioactivities against tumor cells and other pathogens, plus potential in other diseases. Bioprospecting these environments for new drugs is an attractive prospect, especially as marine natural products have high hit rates in a broad range of bioassays, with many in clinical and preclinical trials. Fungi have larger genomes with more BGCs, resulting in greater chemodiversity [6,7] They have produced numerous clinically approved anti-infectives and antitumor drugs, as mentioned earlier, but remain understudied. We are listing significant numbers of compounds (approximately 200) in this review, we will only show the structures of compounds for which biological activities have been reported and will give the names of the others with suitable references, so that readers may consult the original literature for related compounds without a biological activity reported at that time
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