MYCOLab Ai Logo - gold and army green

Biodiversity-Driven Natural Products and Bioactive Metabolites

Summary

This comprehensive review explores how diverse organisms like plants, fungi, and marine creatures produce remarkable chemical compounds for survival and defense. These natural products have inspired many modern medicines, but scientists now understand that the chemical diversity comes not just from the organisms themselves but from their ecological interactions and environmental challenges. By studying how these chemicals are made and what triggers their production, researchers can discover new drugs and medicines while protecting the ecosystems that generate them.

Background

Natural products from plants, fungi, and marine organisms represent diverse sources of bioactive compounds shaped by evolutionary pressures and ecological interactions. Advances in genomics, metabolomics, and chemical ecology have revealed that chemical diversity arises from ecological pressures rather than solely from taxonomic lineage. Hybrid metabolic architectures and cross-kingdom metabolic integration portray a biosynthetic landscape far more dynamic and interconnected than previously understood.

Objective

This scoping review synthesizes emerging insights into the evolutionary drivers, ecological determinants, and mechanistic foundations of natural product diversity across biological kingdoms. The review highlights the central role of silent biosynthetic gene clusters, meta-organismal chemistry, and network-level modes of action in understanding chemodiversity. The framework aims to unlock the vast biosynthetic potential remaining dormant within natural systems.

Results

The review identified that fungal chemical diversity is regulated by ecological stimuli that activate cryptic biosynthetic pathways, with co-culture studies showing up to fourteen-fold increases in metabolite diversity. Mushrooms produce terpenoids, phenolic compounds, and immunomodulatory polysaccharides with vast uncharacterized biosynthetic gene cluster potential. Marine organisms generate structurally distinctive metabolites with halogenation and oxidation patterns reflecting adaptation to extreme environments.

Conclusion

Natural product diversity represents an integrative discipline at the intersection of molecular biology, ecology, evolution, and chemical innovation. Biosynthetic pathways are dynamically regulated by ecological pressures and form interconnected networks rather than isolated routes. Sustainable exploitation requires balancing scientific opportunity with ecological responsibility through microbial fermentation, synthetic biology, and adherence to biodiversity governance frameworks.
  • Published in:Plants (Basel),
  • Study Type:Scoping Review,
  • Source: 41515049
Scroll to Top