Fungi are an important and prolific source of secondary metabolites (SMs) with diverse chemical structures and a wide array of biological properties. In the past two decades, however, the number of new fungal SMs by traditional monoculture method had been greatly decreasing. Fortunately, a growing number of studies have shown that co-culture strategy is an effective approach to awakening silent SM biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in fungal strains to produce cryptic SMs. To enrich our knowledge of this approach and better exploit fungal biosynthetic potential for new drug discovery, this review comprehensively summarizes all fungal co-culture methods and their derived new SMs as well as bioactivities on the basis of an extensive literature search and data analysis. Future perspective on fungal co-culture study, as well as its interaction mechanism, is supplied.

Depsipeptides, an important group of polypeptides containing residues of hydroxy acids and amino acids linked together by amide and ester bonds, have potential applications in agriculture and medicine. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that marine organisms are prolific sources of depsipeptides, such as marine cyanobacteria, sponges, mollusks, microorganisms and algae. However, these substances have not yet been comprehensively summarized. In order to enrich our knowledge about marine depsipeptides, their biological sources and structural features, as well as bioactivities, are highlighted in this review after an extensive literature search and data analysis.

Aspergillus niger is one of the most important sources of secondary metabolites (SMs), with a wide array of pharmacological effects, including anti-inflammatory, antitumor, immunomodulatory and antioxidant effects. However, the biosynthetic analysis of these bioactive components has been rarely reported owing to the lack of high-quality genome sequences and comprehensive analysis. In this study, the whole genome of one marine-sponge-derived strain A. niger L14 was sequenced and assembled as well as in-depth bioinformatic analysis. The results indicated that the sequence assembly of strain L14 generated one high-quality genome with a total size of 36.1 Mb, a G + C content of 45.3% and an N50 scaffold of 4.2 Mb. Gene annotation was extensively deployed using various BLAST databases, including non-redudant (Nr) protein sequence, nucleotide (Nt) sequence, Swiss-Prot, Gene ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COG) as well as Pathogen Host Interactions (PHI) and Carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZy) databases. AntiSMASH analysis revealed that this marine strain harbors a total of 69 SMs biosynthesis gene clusters (BGCs), including 17 PKSs, 18 NRPSs, 21 NRPS-likes, 9 terpenes, 2 indoles, 1 betalactone and 1 siderophore, suggesting its biosynthetic potential to produce a wide variety of SMs. These findings will assist in future investigations on the genetic basis of strain L14 and provide insights into its new bioactive SMs for new drug discovery.