Efforts to Discover Lead Compounds for Microbial Fungicides
The discovery of new antibiotics is tremendously hard
work, because the rate of re-discovery of existing
known compounds is increasing. However, promising
microbial metabolites continue to be discovered using
traditional activity-based screening procedures against
various plant pathogenic fungi. In particular, many of
the site-specific antifungal metabolites have recently
been discovered from microbial metabolites. These
microbial metabolites include non-fungicidal compounds
that interfere with the infection process of
pathogenic fungi, and specific inhibitors of the fungal
biosynthetic pathways for chitin, fatty acids and
nucleic acids.