Malaysian endophytes as a tool of chemical modification / Syuhaida Mohd Yasin

Biotransformation has been a subject of interest since centuries ago. It can be used to modify a compound into another compound, which may be hard to obtain using chemical synthesis, by using microorganisms such as endophytes. The study is aimed to carry out the fermentation of a given substrate, to identify the biotransformation product, as well as to rationalize the chemical modification induced by the endophytes and compare with standard organic chemistry procedure. It was done by culturing endophytes, feeding them with substrates, incubating the culture for one to two weeks, filtering and extracting the mycelium, and lastly analyzing the extract by using Thin Layer Chromatography, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and High Performance Liquid Chromatography technique. It was found that biotransformation of (+)-a-longipinene by Burkholderia has taken place in the experiment. In conclusion, the biotransformation of substrate had been successfully done but further study should be done to purify and identify the resulting compound since it could not be done in this study due to time-constraint.