Unlocking Nature's Vault: Endophytes as plant-sourced biological treasures

Endophytes, a consortium of symbiotic microorganisms residing in plant tissues, have emerged as a potential aspect in shaping plant health, ecological dynamics, and various biotechnological sectors, including agriculture and pharmaceuticals. They exhibit a remarkable taxonomic diversity, extending to a broad spectrum of bacterial and fungal communities, with their distribution linked to several abiotic and biotic factors. Understanding mechanisms underlying endophyte colonization, establishment, and signalling pathways involved in endophyte-host interactions has become crucial in bioprospecting novel bioactive metabolites and biocontrol of pests and pathogens. This review aims to underscore the pivotal roles of medicinal plant endophytes in modulating plant growth dynamics and the biosynthesis of various classes of bioactive compounds with notable applications in the fields of pharmaceuticals, bioremediation and agriculture. The novelty of this review lies in its attempt to collate ethnobotanical knowledge of medicinal plants with the technicalities of modern OMICs technologies, such as metabolomics and metagenomics, which in recent years have been pivotal for screening and characterization of bioactive compounds and in understanding the mechanistic perspectives of intermolecular networking. These OMICs-based technologies also provide insights into the genes and metabolites synthesized by endophytes, offering an in-depth understanding of the various metabolic profiles and genomic characteristics of endophytic population dynamics. Coupling endophyte bioactive compound bioprospecting from various underexplored ecosystems with modern synthetic biology techniques could also potentially open up novel avenues leading to the development of “Magic bullets” to address the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The challenges, limitations, and future perspectives in endophytic research, therefore, require detailed evaluation to encompass the positive aspects of the lead molecules synthesized by the endophytes, which could benefit the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors.