Search

Lichen natural products are a tremendous source of new bioactive chemical entities for drug discovery. The ability to survive in harsh conditions can be directly correlated with the production of some unique lichen metabolites. Despite the potential applications, these unique metabolites have been underutilized by pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries due to their slow growth, low biomass availability, and technical challenges involved in their artificial cultivation. At the same time, DNA sequence data have revealed that the number of encoded biosynthetic gene clusters in a lichen is much higher than in natural products, and the majority of them are silent or poorly expressed. To meet these challenges, the one strain many compounds (OSMAC) strategy, as a comprehensive and powerful tool, has been developed to stimulate the activation of silent or cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters and exploit interesting lichen compounds for industrial applications. Furthermore, the development of molecular network techniques, modern bioinformatics, and genetic tools is opening up a new opportunity for the mining, modification, and production of lichen metabolites, rather than merely using traditional separation and purification techniques to obtain small amounts of chemical compounds. Heterologous expressed lichen-derived biosynthetic gene clusters in a cultivatable host offer a promising means for a sustainable supply of specialized metabolites. In this review, we summarized the known lichen bioactive metabolites and highlighted the application of OSMAC, molecular network, and genome mining-based strategies in lichen-forming fungi for the discovery of new cryptic lichen compounds.

Lichen-associated fungal species have already been investigated in almost all the main growth forms of lichens, however whether or not they are homogeneous and constant within each lichen species are still inconclusive. Moreover, the related ecological factors to affect and structure the fungal composition have been poorly studied. In order to answer these questions, we took Hypogymnia hypotrypa as a model to study the relationship between the lichen-associated fungal composition and two ecological factors, i.e. site and altitude, using the method of IlluminaMiSeq sequencing. Four different sites and two levels of altitude were included in this study, and the effects of site and altitude on fungal community composition were assessed at three levels, i.e. OTU, class and phylum. The results showed that a total of 50 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified and distributed in 4 phyla, 13 classes and 20 orders. The lichen-associated fungal composition within H. hypotrypa were significantly affected by both site and altitude at OTU and class levels, while at the phylum level, it was only affected by altitude. While the lichen associated fungal communities were reported to be similar with endophytic fungi of the moss, our results indicated the opposite results in some degree. But whether there exist specific OTUs within this lichen species corresponding to different sites and altitudes is still open. More lichen species and ecological factors would be taken into the integrated analyses to address these knowledge gaps in the near future.