Metabolomics of plant endophytes and marine microbial symbionts

Metabolomic methods can also be utilised to screen diverse biological sources of potentially novel and sustainable sources of antibiotics and pharmacological-active drugs. Dereplication studies by LC-HRFTMS and NMR can establish the chemical profile of endophytic and/or endozoic microbial extracts and their plant or animal sources. Identifying the compounds of interest at an early stage will aid in the isolation of the bioactive components. Therefore metabolite profiling is important for functional genomics and in the search for new pharmacologically active compounds. Using the tools of metabolomics through the employment of LC-HRFTMS as well as high resolution NMR will be a very efficient approach. Metabolomic profiling has found its application in screening extracts of macroorganisms as well as in the isolation and cultivation of suspected microbial producers of bioactive natural products. Metabolomics is being applied to identify and biotechnologically optimize the production of pharmacologically active secondary metabolites. The links between metabolome evolution during optimisation and processing factors can be identified through metabolomics. Information obtained from a metabolomics data can efficiently establish cultivation and production processes at a small scale which will be finally scaled up to a fermenter system, whilst maintaining or enhancing synthesis of the desired compounds. MZmine and SIEVE softwares are utilized to perform differential analysis of sample populations to find significant expressed features of complex biomarkers between parameter variables. Metabolomes are identified with the aid of existing high resolution MS and NMR records from online or inhouse databases like AntiMarin, a database of microbial secondary metabolites and marine natural products. This is further validated through available reference standards and NMR experiments. Metabolomics has become a powerful tool in systems biology which allows us to gain insights into the potential of natural marine isolates for synthesis of significant quantities of promising new agents, and allows us to manipulate the environment within fermentation systems in a rational manner to select a desired metabolome