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14 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
                Fig. 1. Beautiful and colourful world of lichens of the Western Ghats and representative endophyte isolates.
metabolites by horizontal gene transfer, which can be of therapeutic value for the people working on me. As getting my hosts and growing them in the laboratory are not easy tasks, you can always grow me
in your laboratory by providing the right food (media) and space that I like.
Now the question is how
one can differentiate between
me and other non-endophytic
fungi. In simple words, as I live
inside the living beings, one has
to kill all the fungi present on the
surface (surface sterilization),
cut my host into pieces, and
you can see me emerging out
from inside my host. Therefore,
after surface sterilization, she
gave me food in the form of
potato dextrose agar and I
started growing, but I was not alone. Many of my brothers and sisters, fungal endophytes, were also growing. A total of 250 fungal endophytes along with me were isolated from 14 different lichens collected from the Western
Ghats (Fig. 1). Further, she separated us and called us a pure colony. After many rounds of screening, they selected me along with some other endophytes for their search of anti-
cancer compounds. Although I was beautiful and white in colour, the laboratory was interested in the activity against cancer cell lines showed by me. Further, they allowed me to grow for 28 days so that I could cross my young (lag phase) and adolescence stages (log phase) and reach a long and stationary phase where I could start producing the useful secondary metabolites. Once I reached the stationary phase, I had to face several stresses for my survival. To protect myself from severe conditions,
I synthesized and secreted some compounds, which could help in combating cancer. Along with that, I secreted many other compounds (Fig. 2). Therefore, first, they checked my pool of compounds (crude extract) for its anti-cancer
   We, endophytes, can live inside any living organism in any condition. Yes! We can be inside you as well. There is nothing to be afraid of. We do not harm our hosts or cause them a disease. We help our hosts to combat many diseases and overcome challenging situations by producing some useful compounds known as secondary metabolites.
  












































































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