Discussion

Although marine fungi are a prolific group of secondary metabolite producers, they are not well characterised and are underutilised in their biotechnological application. There is very little knowledge of the biology of fungi living in the ocean and the role and regulation of secondary metabolite production in marine fungi. Here, we demonstrate that the application of rationally designed culture conditions for a group of marine fungi enables efficient production of marine natural products in the laboratory and also in large scale cultures. The resulting extracts were screened for new bioactive compounds with the focus on anti-cancer activities and were used to build up a library of purified natural products.