Abstract

Microorganisms associated with plants are highly diverse and can produce a large number of secondary metabolites, with antimicrobial, anti-parasitic and cytotoxic activities. We are particularly interested in exploring endophytes from medicinal plants found in the Pantanal, a unique and widely unexplored wetland in Brazil. In a bio-prospecting study, strains LGMF1213 and LGMF1215 were isolated as endophytes from Vochysia divergens, and by morphological and molecular phylogenetic analyses were characterized as Phaeophleospora vochysiae sp. nov. The chemical assessment of this species reveals three major compounds with high biological activity, cercoscosporin (1), isocercosporin (2) and the new compound 3-(sec-butyl)-6-ethyl-4,5-dihydroxy-2-methoxy-6-methylcyclohex-2-enone (3). Besides the isolation of P. vochysiae as endophyte, the production of cercosporin compounds suggest that under specific conditions this species causes leaf spots, and may turn into a pathogen, since leaf spots are commonly caused by species of Cercospora that produce related compounds. In addition, the new compound 3-(sec-butyl)-6-ethyl-4,5-dihydroxy-2-methoxy-6-methylcyclohex-2-enone showed considerable antimicrobial activity and low cytotoxicity, which needs further exploration.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-15-2018

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Scientific Reports, v. 8, 3122, p. 1-10.

© The Author(s) 2018

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21400-2

Funding Information

This work was supported by NIH grants CA 91091, GM 105977 and an Endowed University Professorship in Pharmacy to J.R. This work was also supported by the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1TR001998) and NIH grants R01 GM115261 to J. S. T. Additional support came from Fundação Araucária de Apoio e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico do Paraná – Brazil, grant 441/2012–23510, CNPq-Brazil grant 486016/2011–0 to C.G., and CAPES-Brazil – a grant to D.C.S. We also thank Lisandra S. F. Maba and the Laboratório de Microscopia de Fluorescência Convencional e Confocal, UFPR, for image acquisitions.

Related Content

Supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21400-2.

41598_2018_21400_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (3258 kB)
Supplementary Information

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