ABSTRACT
The discovery of new fungal metabolites has been driven by the search for either novel chemical structures or for a desirable biological activity. The chemically guided discovery of new fungal metabolites relies on chromatographic and spectroscopic tools to detect new or unrecognized compounds. This approach is most useful from a chemotaxonomic perspective where the interest is in what metabolite(s) a particular fungus produces. In contrast, the focus of industrial natural products programs is almost entirely biological activity rather than interest in chemical novelty or chemotaxonomy. The power of the biological activity-driven approach is the detection of extremely low-titer metabolites, compounds that would be missed using the chemically guided approach. These low-titer and biologically active metabolites have a good probability of being new or even novel.
