Continuously growing demand for natural products with pharmacological activities has promoted the development of microbial transformation techniques, thereby facilitating the efficient production of natural products and the mining of new active compounds. Furthermore, due to the shortcomings and defects of microbial transformation, it is an important scientific issue of social and economic value to improve and optimize microbial transformation technology in increasing the yield and activity of transformed products. In this review, the aspects regarding the optimization of fermentation and the cross-disciplinary strategy, leading to the microbial transformation of increased levels of the high-efficiency process from natural products of a plant or microbial origin, were discussed. Additionally, due to the increasing craving for targeted and efficient methods for detecting transformed metabolites, analytical methods based on multiomics were also discussed. Such strategies can be well exploited and applied to the production of more efficient and more natural products from microbial resources.

In order to investigate bioactive natural products derived from the endophytic fungus Penicillium ochrochloron SWUKD4.1850, a comprehensive study focusing on secondary metabolites was conducted. This research led to the isolation of twenty distinct compounds, including a novel nortriterpenoid (compound 20), alongside nineteen compounds that had been previously characterized (compounds 1–19). The chemical structures of these compounds were elucidated using spectroscopic techniques and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analyses. Compounds 1–17 were isolated for the first time as metabolites of P. ochrochloron. Except for compounds 1–14, significant structural similarity was discerned between the metabolites of the endophytic fungus and those of the host plant. Compound 20 is noted as the inaugural instance of a naturally occurring 27-nor-3,4-secocycloartane schinortriterpenoid, while compound 17 was identified in fungi for the first time. An antifungal assay showed that compound 10 displayed a broader antifungal spectrum and a stronger inhibitory effect towards four important plant pathogens, at inhibitory rates of 74.9 to 85.3%. The in vitro radical scavenging activities of compounds 1, 3, 8, 15, and 16 showed higher antioxidant activity than vitamin C. Moreover, a cytotoxic assay revealed that compound 20 had moderate cytotoxicity against the HL-60, SMMC-7721, and MCF-7 cell lines (IC₅₀ 6.5–17.8 μM). Collectively, these findings indicate that P. ochrochloron has abundant secondary metabolite synthesis ability in microbial metabolism and that these metabolites have good biological activity and have the potential to enhance plant disease resistance.

Chinese paper-based cultural artifacts are threatened by mold deterioration, necessitating precise mold identification for effective conservation. This study introduces a hyperspectral imaging-based triplePath multimodal feature fusion network (TPMFN) to improve the sensitivity and timeliness of traditional methods. It combines spatial and spectral features using an advanced 2-D CNN with spatial attention for RGB details, a SpectralFormer for analyzing 400–1000 nm hyperspectral data, and a hybridCNN for extracting spectral-spatial features. Various cross-modal fusions (concatenation, addition, multiplication) facilitate efficient integration and classification of multi-source data. Testing six mold types on paper artifacts, TPMFN significantly outperforms SVM, 1-D CNN, 2-D CNN, SSFTT, HybridSN, and SpectralFormer on OA (98.78%), AA (98.52%), and Kappa (98.21%), with a 3.83% improvement in detail recognition. Ablation studies confirmed a 7.5% feature discriminability enhancement from the dual attention mechanism. This research provides a high-precision, practical solution for paper artifact mildew detection, crucial for establishing preventative conservation.