Exploring the chemodiversity and biological activities of the secondary metabolites from the marine fungus Neosartorya pseudofischeri.

The production of fungal metabolites can be remarkably influenced by various cultivation parameters. To explore the biosynthetic potentials of the marine fungus, Neosartorya pseudofischeri, which was isolated from the inner tissue of starfish Acanthaster planci, glycerol-peptone-yeast extract (GlyPY) and glucose-peptone-yeast extract (GluPY) media were used to culture this fungus. When cultured in GlyPY medium, this fungus produced two novel diketopiperazines, neosartins A and B (1 and 2), together with six biogenetically-related known diketopiperazines,1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-2, 3-dimethyl-1,4-dioxopyrazino[1,2-a]indole (3), 1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-2-methyl-3-methylen e-1,4-dioxopyrazino[1,2-a]indole (4), 1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-2-methyl-1,3,4-trioxopyrazino[1,2-a] indole (5), 6-acetylbis(methylthio)gliotoxin (10), bisdethiobis(methylthio)gliotoxin (11), didehydrobisdethiobis(methylthio)gliotoxin (12) and N-methyl-1H-indole-2-carboxamide (6).

Discovering new agents active against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus with ligand-based approaches.

To discover new agents active against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), in silico models derived from 5451 cell-based anti-MRSA assay data were developed using four machine learning methods, including naïve Bayesian, support vector machine (SVM), recursive partitioning (RP), and k-nearest neighbors (kNN). A total of 876 models have been constructed based on physicochemical descriptors and fingerprints. The overall predictive accuracies of the best models exceeded 80% for both training and test sets.

Pseudaboydins A and B: novel isobenzofuranone derivatives from marine fungus Pseudallescheria boydii associated with starfish Acanthaster planci.

Two novel isobenzofuranone derivatives, pseudaboydins A (1) and B (2), along with five known compounds, including (R)-2-(2-hydroxypropan-2-yl)-2,3-dihydro-5-hydroxybenzofuran (3), (R)-2-(2-hydroxypropan-2-yl)-2,3-dihydro-5-methoxybenzofuran (4), 3,3'-dihydroxy-5,5'-dimethyldiphenyl ether (5), 3-(3-methoxy-5-methylphenoxy)-5-methylphenol (6) and (-)-regiolone (7), were isolated from the culture broth of the marine fungus, Pseudallescheria boydii, associated with the starfish, Acanthaster planci. Their structures were elucidated primarily based on NMR and MS data. The absolute configurations of 1-4 were determined by CD spectroscopy and single-crystal X-ray diffraction studies.