Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2022
Publication Title
Marine Drugs
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.
Keywords
Bioactive compounds, Extreme environments, Fungal cultivation strategies, Marine fungi, Marine natural products
Volume
20
Issue
1
DOI
10.3390/md20010062
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
© 2022 by the authors.
Recommended Citation
Giddings, Lesley Ann and Newman, David J., "Extremophilic Fungi from Marine Environments: Underexplored Sources of Antitumor, Anti-Infective and Other Biologically Active Agents" (2022). Chemistry: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/chm_facpubs/52
Comments
Archived as published.