Prospects for biotechnological exploitation of endophytes using functional metagenomics.

Abstract The usage of natural products, especially in the treatment of diseases, has a long history. While natural products used to be administered directly, they today serve as lead compounds and structural scaffolds for the development of new drugs and other market products. The success of combinatorial approaches to develop new products strongly depends on natural product-likeness. This exemplifies the importance of natural products as structural leads during product development and demonstrates natural product discovery to be as important as ever. This chapter highlights endophytes as a rich bio-resource for the identification of novel natural compounds and emphasizes functional metagenomics as a promising method to source the endophytic potential. With the majority of microorganisms not readily cultivable under laboratory conditions, a vast amount of natural products synthesized by endophytes remains inaccessible. Functional metagenomics circumvents current cultivation limitations by direct cloning of bacterial community DNA. This procedure is, however, rarely performed exclusively on endophytes. This chapter outlines the procedures underlying this methodology with focus on its application to endophytes.