Exploitation of Fungi: Redefined

A long time back the discovery of penicillin opened the new door for fungal antibiotics. Gradually a large number of secondary metabolites harnessed by various scientists and used now a days as antibiotics. Although the new area to be yet explored is fungal endophytes. All plants in natural ecosystems appear to be symbiotic with fungal endophytes. This highly diverse group of fungi can have profound impacts on plant communities through increasing fitness by conferring abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, increasing biomass and decreasing water consumption, or decreasing fitness by altering resource allocation. Endophytic fungi are an important part, are ubiquitous and occur within almost all the plants, including a broad range of hosts in various ecosystems, and therefore play an important role in the natural environment. Despite extensive work in this field, the ecological significance of these fungi remains poorly characterized. More than 1 million species of endophytic fungi are estimated to exist based on a ratio of vascular plants to fungal species of 1:4 or 1:5. Nevertheless, our recognition of endophyte diversity is limited at present. In surveys of endophyte diversity, traditional techniques, such as cultivation-dependent methods, have been routinely used in previous studies collectively, more than 100 years of research suggests that most, if not all, plants in natural ecosystems are symbiotic with mycorrhizal fungi and/or fungal endophytes. The discovery of endophytic fungi in natural environments, however, has been limited by traditional methodology due to some non-sporulating and non-culturable fungi. Molecular techniques, such as DNA fingerprinting and sequencing methods, have been successfully employed in the detection and identification of endophytic fungi, and different endophyte diversity and community composition have been documented by cultivation-dependent and molecular techniques. So what next, are endophytes the future medicines? The present review explore the potential of fungi with respect to the production of various secondary metabolites/medicines.