Bioprospecting of Marine Fungi

Abstract

Marine fungi are eukaryotic organisms occurring in water and sediments as parasitic and/or symbiotic on marine flora and fauna. The Indian subcontinent has a rich marine habitat, and fungi have high diversity and distribution colonizing marine flora and fauna as endophytes. Since marine fungi have to compete with a diverse array of organisms, accordingly, they develop several mechanisms for survival and growth. These unique attributes of fungi seem to herald great promise in the production of valuable secondary metabolites which mainly comprise of alkaloids, terpenoids, steroids, peptides, polyketides, and others. All of these have excellent bioprospecting potentials such as antitumor, anticancer, antimicrobial, and enzymatic activities, bioremediation, as well as in the production of several therapeutically bioactive agents. It is believed that exploring fungi from new and extreme habitats especially those endophytic with other marine flora and fauna may lead to the isolation of novel fungal metabolites with immense bioactivities. This review summarizes the biologically active secondary metabolites produced by marine-derived fungi. It also briefs some of the products isolated and identified currently in our laboratory. We further discuss that marine fungi can be made to induce production of novel metabolites by using modern and sophisticated metabolic engineering techniques like mutagenomics, recombinant DNA techniques, and improved molecular microbiology techniques. Several such bioprospecting strategies may be utilized in order to develop competent fungal endophytes for the discovery of novel metabolites