Isolation and characterization of marine fungi in Malaysia / Normahanim Hassan

Natural products can be defined as chemical constituents containing carbon that were isolated from primary or secondary metabolites of diverse living organisms including plants, animals and microorganism (Vignesh et al., 2011). Natural products can be divided into primary and secondary metabolites. The primary metabolites such as polysaccharides, fatty acids, proteins and nucleic acids are basically used for their biological systems for an example in reproduction, photosynthesis, transpiration and others. Differ to secondary metabolites. it is produced by living organisms that are not essential for their basic survival but give a significant value to human mankind as they might have biological activities such as anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-diabetics, anti-malarial and others. They can be classified into several classes of compounds including flavonoids, alkaloids, terpenoids, polyketides, non-ribosomial peptides and others (Berdy, 2005). Throughout decades ago, the nature would be in the front line in order to combat with wide spectrum of human diseases. Plants are one of the natural sources that served as traditional medicines such as Cedrus species (cedar), Commiphora species (myrrh), Cupressus sempevirens (cypress), Glycyrrhiza glabra (licorice) and Papaver somniferum (poppy juice), in which they are still being used in the pharmaceutical market today from cough relief to parasitic infections. Based on Ebers Papyrus document, there are about 700 remedies that are mostly from plants origin. In order to benefit from microbes, marine sample was collected from Malaysian biospheres and forty-nine strains of fungi were isolated from it. On the basis of morphological growth, eighteen strains were chosen and their organic extracts were subjected to High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) for the initial metabolic profiling. Out of these, one was chosen for the isolation of secondary metabolites and subjected to column chromatography with ethyl acetate and hexane as an eluents. Three fractions were further purified by semi preparative High Perfomance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and yielded five pure compounds. These compounds were characterized using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), Ultraviolet (UV), Infrared (IR) Spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry (MS). The molecular genetics of the selected fungus was studied and identified as Chaetomium globosum.