[en] Microbial organisms are a precious source of natural products for medical and agricultural fields. These natural products are produced by different enzymes classes from the secondary metabolism, resulting in a large diversity of molecular structures and bioactivities. Currently, the main known microbial producers of bioactive compounds are bacteria and fungi, which have already been extensively exploited for the pharmaceutical and phytosanitary drugs. However, other unicellular eukaryotes seem to also have potential for the production of bioactive compounds, which present somehow a new continent for the discovery of natural products. A preliminary large-scale in silico analysis through unicellular eukaryotic lineages, for which genomic data are available, indicates that a part of these organisms might possess diverse classes of secondary metabolism pathways and thus be potential candidates for the discovery of novel compounds.
