¹GEOMAR Centre For Marine Biotechnology (GEOMAR-Biotech), Research Unit Marine Natural Products Chemistry, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre For Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel, DEU
²Flensburg University Of Applied Sciences, Flensburg, DEU

Crop diseases reduce agricultural yield significantly, contributing to poverty and hunger worldwide. Due to resistance development, there is a need for discovering new, more effective biocontrol agents. Marine fungi represent a rich source for bioactive metabolites. However, the gene clusters of large proportions of the cultivable fungi remain silent in standard laboratory culture conditions. Co-cultivation has been used to awaken biosynthetic pathways to produce cryptic compounds. We have isolated 120 fungal strains from various sources from the Baltic Sea. The fungi were directly co-cultivated with a panel of phytopathogens. The extracts of both mono- and co-cultures were analysed using UPLC-QTOF-MS/MS and their bioactivities tested. Metabolomics and molecular networking using GNPS platform were applied for dereplication/annotation of the chemical metabolites. This work will describe our efforts for stimulation of chemical capacity and bioactivity of the most promising co-culture pairs for bioactivity-guided purification scheme.