Chemical Diversity of Secondary Metabolites Produced by Brazilian Endophytic Fungi

Endophytes are microorganisms that live inside vegetal tissues without causing any loss to the host plant. They display wide biosynthetic capacity when producing several bioactive secondary metabolites, whose induction could be related to activation of genes, which might be silent or expressed depending on the geographic characteristics from where the endophytic was isolated. The extraordinary richness of the Brazilian biodiversity has encouraged several research groups in the endophytic bioprospecting. This review covers natural products reported by studies on from the Brazilian endophytic fungi cultures and classified them into three chemical classes (terpenes, phenolic, and nitrogen-containing compounds). For discussion purposes, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used as an unsupervised explorative method to evaluate the chemical variation in the Brazilian endophyte dataset. In addition, the dendrogram from the Hierarchical Clustering Analysis (HCA) confirmed the PCA results, and HCA could identify some main endophytic clusters. Our analysis clarified how the secondary metabolites were distributed in the different Brazilian endophyte strains, and this information will be a reliable guide that will support researchers to design microbial culture strategies.