Effects of Media on the Fungal Metabolome

Variation in the growing environment (e.g. temperature, pH, nutrition) can have significant impacts on the quantity and diversity of fungal secondary metabolites. In the industrial setting, optimization of growing conditions can lead to significantly increased production of a compound of interest. Such optimization becomes much more difficult in a drug-discovery screening situation, as the ideal conditions for one organism may induce poor metabolic diversity for a different organism. The manipulation of culture growing conditions for the purpose of augmenting the natural metabolic diversity of microorganisms is often referred to as the OSMAC (one strain, many compounds) approach. Here, the impact of different media types on the secondary metabolite production of several fungal strains is examined in the context of the drug-discovery screening process.