With the advent of genetic techniques
that permit the isolation and expression of biosynthetic
cassettes, microbes and their marine invertebrate hosts may
well be the new frontier for natural products lead discovery.
Plant endophytes also offer an exciting new resource, and
research continues to reveal that many of the important drugs
originally thought to be produced by plants are probably
products of an interaction with endophytic microbes residing
in the tissues between living plant cells. This has been further
accentuated by the recent report of the isolation of hypericin
from an endophytic fungus from Hypericum perforatum