Breaking into nature's secret medicine cabinet: lichens - a biochemical goldmine ready for discovery.

ABSTRACT: Secondary metabolites are a crucial source of bioactive compounds playing a key role in the development of new pharmaceuticals. Recently, biosynthetic research has benefited significantly from progress on various fronts, including reduced sequencing costs, improved genome/metabolome mining strategies, and expanding tools/databases to compare and characterize chemical diversity. Steady advances in these fields are crucial for research on non-modal organisms such as lichen-forming fungi (LFF). Although most fungi produce bioactive metabolites, biosynthetic research on LFF (c. 21% of known fungi) lags behind, primarily due to experimental challenges. However, in recent years, several such challenges have been tackled, and, in parallel, a critical foundation of genomic data and pipelines has b

SUBMITTER: Singh G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11923402 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature