Metabolomics and dereplication studies of some Egyptian medicinal plants and its associated endophytes

A major health problem is the increase of incidence of cancer and drug resistant bacterial infection cases which has become a leading cause of death worldwide. These facts emphasize the need for the search for new anticancer and anti- microbial agents. This work aims for the investigation of the secondary metabolites of Lagerstroemia tomentosa extract and associated fungal endophytes to search for new antimicrobial and anti-cancer natural products.

The ethyl acetate extract of the plant was prepared and fractionated on MPLC. Metabolite profiling and dereplication studies of the plant fractions identified known and new compounds [1]. Multivariate data analysis was employed efficiently to highlight the putative metabolites which were predicted to be responsible for the activity of active fractions. Metabolomics and bioassay-guided fractionation led to the isolation of five compounds. On the other hand; six endophytic strains were isolated from different parts of the fresh plant [1]. The fungal extracts were tested against lung and ovarian cancer cell line and five drug resistant bacteria (MARSA16, MARSA106, two strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae and Mycobacterium marinum). Investigation of the biological activity showed a significant anti-microbial activity and moderate anti-cancer activity. Metabolites fingerprinting using HR-MS and NMR was successfully used to choose the optimized culture media which yield the maximum amounts of the bioactive metabolites.

References:

[1] Tawfike, A.F. and Viegelmann, C. and Edrada-Ebel, R. Metabolomics and dereplication strategies in natural products. In: Metabolomics Tools for Natural Product Discovery. Methods in Molecular Biology, 1055. Glasgow, UK; University of Strathclyde. 2013: 227 – 244.