Discovery of new bioactive natural products from fungi of unique ecological niches / 国际药学研究杂志

ABSTRACT

The biodiversity of fungi in taxonomy and the biotopes in which they inhabit leads to the production of a variety of secondary metabolites that display a broad range of bioactivities, from which some very important medicines have been discovered. Even though the fungal secondary metabolites are an important source of drug leads, it has become increasingly difficult to discover new natural product scaffolds due to extensive screening of common soil fungi. Those special types of fungi have been largely neglected, presumably due to the difficulty in collecting and culturing of the organisms. Therefore, fungi of significantly underexplored taxonomic and ecological groups provide limitless metabolic potential for the production of new bioactive natural products, and systematic investigations of these fungal species will definitely play a key role in the discovery of new drug leads and understanding the chemical and biological bases for their living strategies. During the past four years, our research group has mainly focused on special types of fungi as sources of new bioactive metabolites, such as the endophytic fungi and the Cordyceps-colonizing fungi. Some results from this work are summarized herein.