Fungal Genome Mining and Activation of Silent Gene Clusters

Abstract

Fungi produce numerous secondary metabolites that show antibiotic activity against various microorganisms, antiviral, antitumor and/or fungicidal activity. One of the major challenges, however, is to understand the physiological meaning of the many secondary metabolites for the producing microorganism. As long as this is not understood it is often not possible to produce the compounds under laboratory conditions and to predict the regulatory circuits involved in the regulation of their biosyntheses. This fact is supported by the finding that genome mining of available fungal genomes indicated that their potential to produce compounds is greatly underestimated. Fungal genomes bear the genetic information for the biosynthesis of many more compounds which still await discovery. Despite this limitation, to get access to the vast number of unknown compounds encoded by silent gene clusters, mixing genomic data, genetic engineering and analytical techniques provides a new avenue to discover novel and potentially bioactive natural products.