Abstract
Azole antifungal agents are widely used as active ingredients in antifungal pharmaceuticals and agricultural fungicides. An increase in the use of azole antifungals has resulted in an increase in the concentration of these compounds in wastewater and surface water, with potential implications for agriculture. In the present study, bifonazole (BIF) and clotrimazole (CTZ) were selected for investigation because of their widespread use in topical formulations and persistence in the environment. The mycoremediation capacity of BIF and CTZ by mycelia of Lentinula edodes in in vitro culture was evaluated. The main aim of this study was to identify the presumable biodegradation products of the investigated active pharmaceutical substances using the LC/MS/MS method. For this purpose, the media were enriched with the following active pharmaceutical ingredients selected for this study: BIF powder, CTZ powder, and BIF cream, each of them at the same concentration of 0.1 mg/mL. Subsequently, thin-layer chromatography coupled with densitometry was used to evaluate the content of BIF and CTZ in mycelium from in vitro cultures of L. edodes. The degradation process was found to affect primarily the imidazole moiety of both investigated compounds. In addition, the amounts of undegraded investigated compounds were found to be 4.98, 9.26, and 4.56 mg/g dry weight for BIF powder, CTZ powder, and BIF cream, respectively. Therefore, the findings of this study revealed that L. edodes could be considered for remediation of pollution caused by azole antifungal agents.
Highlights
Civilizational development causes increasing environmental contaminations with heavy metals and chemical substances, e.g., medicines, which pose a threat to the health and safety of humans and animals
The main purpose of our study was the assessment of the ability of L. edodes to accumulate or degrade azole antifungal agents
The selected drug class is widely used as CTZ in mycelium from in vitro culture extract of the Lentinula edodes cultured on Oddoux liquid medium enriched with these active substances
Summary
Civilizational development causes increasing environmental contaminations with heavy metals and chemical substances, e.g., medicines, which pose a threat to the health and safety of humans and animals. CTZ is not completely removed during sewage treatment, which can cause contamination of agricultural soil through municipal biosolids or wastewater (Sabourin et al 2011). It has ecotoxicological effects at environmentally realistic concentrations and affects algal communities at picomolar concentrations (Mudgal et al 2013; Porsbring et al 2009). One of the most frequently described methods for effective elimination of contaminations caused by pharmaceutical preparations from the environment is photocatalytic degradation. Lentinula edodes was selected for investigation because of its effectiveness in the mycoremediation of xenobiotics such as cephalosporin antibiotics, synthetic testosterone, and 17α-ethynylestradiol (Muszyńska et al 2018; Dąbrowska et al 2018)
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