Structures and antitumor activities of ten new and twenty known surfactins from the deep-sea bacterium Limimaricola sp. SCSIO 53532

Abstract

Surfactins are natural biosurfactants with myriad potential applications in the areas of healthcare and environment. However, surfactins were almost exclusively produced by the bacterium Bacillus species in previous reported literatures, together with difficulty in isolating pure monomer, which resulted in making extensive effort to remove duplication and little discovery of new surfactins in recent years. In the present study, the result of Molecular Networking indicated that Limimaricola sp. SCSIO 53532 might well be a potential resource for surfacin-like compounds based on OSMAC strategy. To search for new surfactins with significant biological activity, further study was undertaken on the strain. As a result, ten new surfactins (1–10), along with twenty known surfactins (11–30), were isolated from the ethyl acetate extract of SCSIO 53532. Their chemical structures were established by detailed 1D and 2D NMR spectroscopy, HRESIMS data, secondary ion mass spectrometry (MS/MS) analysis, and chemical degradation (Marfey’s method) analysis. Cytotoxic activities of twenty-seven compounds against five human tumor cell lines were tested, and five compounds showed significant antitumor activities with IC50 values less than 10 μM. Furtherly, analysis of structure–activity relationships revealed that the branch of side chain, the esterification of Glu or Asp residue, and the amino acid residue of position 7 possessed a great influence on antitumor activity.