Lichens have been widely used in traditional medicine especially by indigenous communities worldwide, but their slow growth and difficulties in isolation of lichen symbionts and associated microbes have hindered pharmaceutical utilization of lichen-produced compounds. Advances in high-throughput sequencing techniques now allow detailed investigations of the complex microbial communities formed by fungi, green algae and/or cyanobacteria, and other bacteria within the lichen thalli. Here we used amplicon sequencing, shotgun metagenomics and in silico metabolomics together with compound extractions to study reindeer lichens collected from southern Finland. Our aim was to evaluate the potential of Cladonia species as sources of novel natural products. Here, we compared predicted biosynthetic pathways of lichen compounds from isolated genome-sequenced lichen fungi and our environmental samples. Potential biosynthetic genes could then be further used to produce secondary metabolites in more tractable hosts. Furthermore, we detected multiple compounds by metabolite analyses, which can reveal connections between the identified biosynthetic gene clusters and their products. As a whole, our results contribute to metagenomic data studies from complex lichen-symbiotic communities and provide valuable new information to be used in further biochemical and pharmacological studies. Funding: Academy of Finland (grant number 1308266) and Finnish Cultural Foundation (grant number 170982).
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