Bioactive molecules from fungal endophytes and their applications in pharmaceutical industries: challenges and future scope.

Medicinal plants are an important source of bioactive compounds and have been used to isolate various bioactive compounds having industrial applications. The demand for plants derived bioactive molecules is increasing gradually. However, the extensive use of these plants to extract bioactive molecules has threatened many plant species. Moreover, extracting bioactive molecules from these plants is laborious, costly, and time-consuming. So, some alternative sources and strategies are urgently needed to produce these bioactive molecules similar to that of plant origin. However, the interest in new bioactive molecules has recently shifted from plants to endophytic fungi because many fungi produce bioactive molecules similar to their host plant. Endophytic fungi live in mutualistic association within the healthy plant tissue without causing disease symptoms to the host plant. These fungi are a treasure house of novel bioactive molecules having broad pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural applications. The rapid increase in publications in this domain over the last three decades proves that natural product biologists and chemists are paying great attention to the natural bioactive products from endophytic fungi. Though endophytes are source of novel bioactive molecules but there is need of advanced technologies like clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9) and epigenetic modifiers to enhance the production of compounds having industrial applications. This review provides an overview of the various industrial applications of bioactive molecules produced by endophytic fungi and the rationale behind selecting specific plants for fungal endophyte isolation. Overall, this study presents the current state of knowledge and highlights the potential of endophytic fungi for developing alternative therapies for drug-resistant infections.