Dynamics of Chemical Diversity during Co-Cultures: An Integrative Time-Scale Metabolomics Study of Fungal Endophytes Cophinforma mamane and Fusarium solani.

A rapid and efficient metabolomic study of Cophinforma mamane and Fusarium solani co-cultivation in time-series based analysis was developed to study metabolome variations during their fungal interactions. The fungal metabolomes were studied through the integration of four metabolomic tools: MS-DIAL, a chromatographic deconvolution of liquid-chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS); MS-FINDER, a structure-elucidation program with a wide range metabolome database; GNPS, an effective method to organize MS/MS fragmentation spectra, and MetaboAnalyst, a comprehensive web application for metabolomic data analysis and interpretation. Co-cultures of C. mamane and F. solani induced different patterns of metabolite production over 10 days of incubation and induced production of five de novo compounds not occurring in monocultures. These results emphasize that co-culture in time-frame analysis is an interesting method to unravel hidden metabolome in the investigation of fungal chemodiversity.