Biologically Active Compounds from Bacterial Endophytes

Abstract

The phytomicrobiome plays a key role in incrementing the fitness of the host. The interactions between plants and their microbes yield a vast and diverse assortment of secondary metabolites. The myriad of genes within bacterial cells thriving inside plant tissues (i.e., endophytes) contributes to the production and conversion of small molecules into bioactive compounds, and the genome mining can be a powerful tool to extract this knowledge from large amounts of data sets. In this chapter, annotated biosynthetic gene clusters (n = 4614 unique within 60,632 genes) from genomes of endophytes assigned to Actinobacteria (n = 26), Bacteroidetes (n = 6), Firmicutes (n = 15), and Proteobacteria (n = 99) were analyzed and predicted to be involved in the biosynthesis of 4766 types of secondary metabolites classified within 22 families. The vast majority of secondary metabolites was predicted as putative (n = 3684), followed by those involved in the biosynthesis of nonribosomal peptide synthetase (n = 293), polyketide synthases (n = 268), and terpene (n = 120) compounds. This reveals that the community of endophytes conceals a great source of potential proteins with novel enzymatic activities and novel families of secondary metabolites.