Plant Bioactive Metabolites and Drugs Produced by Endophytic Fungi of Spermatophyta

Rosario Nicoletti and Antonio Fiorentino
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Rosario Nicoletti: Council for Agricultural Research and Economics. Rome 00185, Italy
Antonio Fiorentino: Department of Environmental Biological and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies, Second University of Naples, Via Vivaldi 43, Caserta 81100, Italy

Agriculture, 2015, vol. 5, issue 4, 1-53

Abstract: It is known that plant-based ethnomedicine represented the foundation of modern pharmacology and that many pharmaceuticals are derived from compounds occurring in plant extracts. This track still stimulates a worldwide investigational activity aimed at identifying novel bioactive products of plant origin. However, the discovery that endophytic fungi are able to produce many plant-derived drugs has disclosed new horizons for their availability and production on a large scale by the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, following the path traced by the blockbuster drug taxol, an increasing number of valuable compounds originally characterized as secondary metabolites of plant species belonging to the Spermatophyta have been reported as fermentation products of endophytic fungal strains. Aspects concerning sources and bioactive properties of these compounds are reviewed in this paper.

Keywords: plant-derived drugs; bioactive compounds; endophytic fungi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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