Abstract
The most common sterol in fungi is ergosterol, which has frequently been investigated in human pathogenic fungal strains. This sterol, and others isolated from fungal strains, has also demonstrated cytotoxicity against cancer cell lines and antimicrobial activities. Marine fungi can produce high amounts of bioactive compounds. So, a screening was performed to study sterol composition using GC/MS in 19 marine fungal strains and ergosterol was always the major one. One strain, Clonostachys rosea MMS1090, was selected due to its high amount of eburicol and a one strain many compounds approach was performed on seven culture media to optimize its production. After purification and structural identification by NMR, eburicol was assessed against four cancer cell lines, MCF-7, MDA-MB-231, NSCLC-N6-L16 and A549, and seven human pathogenic bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus sp., Bacillus cereus, Listeria ivanovii, Escherichia coli, Citrobacter freundii and Salmonella spp. The most significant activity was cytotoxicity against MCF-7 cells (2 µM). This is the first report of such an accumulation of eburicol in the marine fungal strain C. rosea confirming its potential in the production of bioactive lipids.
Highlights
Lipids are actively involved in metabolic reactions like cell recognition, trans-membrane signaling, apoptosis, and growth or cell differentiation [1]
Casein Agar (DCA) culture media with 19 marine fungal strains. They were selected from the fungal collection of the laboratory either because they are representative of the major genera (Trichoderma, Acremonium, Penicillium) of the Mer Molécules Santé (MMS) marine fungal strain collection or because an unusual biological active conjugated fatty acid was previously isolated from the strain (Clonostachys rosea MM1090) [24]
The same variability for total lipid (TL) content was observed in strains belonging to Penicillium genus with values ranging from 2.7% (MMS460) to 33.5% (MMS646)
Summary
Lipids are actively involved in metabolic reactions like cell recognition, trans-membrane signaling, apoptosis, and growth or cell differentiation [1]. The presence of sterols in every eukaryotic organism highlights the importance of these molecules in biological evolution [5,6]. Sterols are present in all organisms, a great diversity can be observed depending on the kingdom studied. Within fungi, ergosterol is the main sterol which is present in the plasma membrane, unlike animals, in which it is cholesterol [7,8]. Biosynthetic pathways of those two sterols are distinct but have squalene as a common precursor.
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