Endophytic Fungi Are Multifunctional Biosynthesizers 53the alkyl alcohol side chains of these acetate esters act the basic free alkanes of
diesel as they specially have been detected in every diesel sample that had
been analyzed. Moreover, breakages of the ester bond go after by a reduction
of the alcohol to a methyl group and resulting in alkane which similar to that
found in diesel.
Moreover, further work has indicated the presence of decyl esters and
nonyl in the components of fungal VOCs (Griffin et al., 2010). However,
diesel fuels have series of straight chained hydrocarbons; also there they have
cyclic alkanes, branched alkanes and benzene derivatives along with a lot of
polyaromatic hydrocarbons (Griffin et al., 2010 and Mallette et al., 2014). In
addition, the analysis of VOCs of this fungus is resulted in an array of ketones,
alcohols, esters and different other hydrocarbons such as benzenes derivatives,
cycloalkenes and cycloalkanes (Mallette et al., 2014).
7. ENDOPHYTES AND CONCERN OF MAJOR
HEALTH PROBLEMS
The expanding of world health problems caused by various deadly
diseases such as drug-resistant microbes, viruses, and cancers are considered
as an alarm. Although thousands of diseases have been described, less than
one-third of them can be treated symptomatically and only a few can be cured
(Strobel 2003 and Selim et al., 2012). Cancer is the largest single cause of
death, claiming over hundred million lives each year. To date, a lot of
anticancer drugs are discovered and clinically in use. However, resistance to
anticancer medications was discovered recently. Therefore, an intensive search
for new, potent and effective agents to compact with these serious disease
problems is now under way and the endophytes was introduced as a novel and
rich source of functional metabolites which have potentially useful medicinal
applications (Selim et al., 2011 and 2012).
8. ENDOPHYTES AS A PROMISING SOURCE
FOR DRUG DISCOVERY
In the past few decades, scientists have begun to realize that almost all
higher plants may serve as a reservoir of indescribable numbers of endophytic
microbes (Bacon and White 2000). These endophytic microbes are fungi and