Endophytic fungi as a medicinal repository of potential therapeutic compounds

Abstract

Plants have been long used for their ethnomedicinal values. However, the fungi growing in association with the plants are also found to produce metabolites of potential medicinal use explored only to a limited extend. Endophytic fungi, isolated from medicinal plants have been screened for various in-vitro biological activities. Anticancer, antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antioxidant etc. activities have been reported from these endophytic fungal isolates. Especially mangrove endophytic fungi owing to the harsh environmental conditions produce more of these metabolites and thus demand special attention of researchers. The present review makes an exhaustive study of these endophytic fungi from diverse sources, the therapeutic compounds isolated from them and their respective pharmacological activities. However, the reported data remains incomplete due to lack of in vivo experimentations which therefore needs further investigations in future.