Bioactive molecules from fungal endophytes and their applications in pharmaceutical industries: challenges and future scope.

Medicinal plants are an important source of bioactive compounds and have been used to isolate various bioactive compounds having industrial applications. The demand for plants derived bioactive molecules is increasing gradually. However, the extensive use of these plants to extract bioactive molecules has threatened many plant species. Moreover, extracting bioactive molecules from these plants is laborious, costly, and time-consuming. So, some alternative sources and strategies are urgently needed to produce these bioactive molecules similar to that of plant origin. However, the interest in new bioactive molecules has recently shifted from plants to endophytic fungi because many fungi produce bioactive molecules similar to their host plant. Endophytic fungi live in mutualistic association within the healthy plant tissue without causing disease symptoms to the host plant. These fungi are a treasure house of novel bioactive molecules having broad pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural applications. The rapid increase in publications in this domain over the last three decades proves that natural product biologists and chemists are paying great attention to the natural bioactive products from endophytic fungi. Though endophytes are source of novel bioactive molecules but there is need of advanced technologies like clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9) and epigenetic modifiers to enhance the production of compounds having industrial applications. This review provides an overview of the various industrial applications of bioactive molecules produced by endophytic fungi and the rationale behind selecting specific plants for fungal endophyte isolation. Overall, this study presents the current state of knowledge and highlights the potential of endophytic fungi for developing alternative therapies for drug-resistant infections.

Antimicrobial potential of endophytic fungi isolated from Dillenia indica L. and identification of bioactive molecules produced by Fomitopsis meliae (Undrew.) Murril.

The present study evaluated the antibacterial potential of endophytic fungi isolated from Dillenia indica L. and identified bioactive compounds responsible for their antimicrobial activity. A total of twenty-five endophytic fungi were preliminarily screened for their antibacterial activity against human pathogenic bacteria, i.e., Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Bacillus subtilis by dual culture assay. The strains having antibacterial activity were selected and crude extracts were prepared from them. The crude extracts were screened for antibacterial activity by agar well diffusion assay. The ethyl acetate extract of Fomitopsis meliae showed the highest activity against selected human pathogenic bacteria, with a zone of inhibition ranging from 15 to 29 mm. The Gas chromatography-Mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis of the ethyl acetate extract of F. meliae showed the presence of 40 compounds with predominance of Dodecane (8.87%), Ethyl 2-thiopheneacetate (4.12%), Tetradecane (13.86%), Hexadecane (12.05%), Octadecane (6.67%), Benzaldehyde, 4-(1-methylethyl)- (10.83%), Griseofulvin (3.31%).