Bioactive Potential of Marine Endophytic Fungi associated with Plants in Marine Ecosystem

 

Gopi K.¹, Jayaprakashvel M²*

¹Research Scholar, Department of Marine Bio technology, AMET University, Chennai.

²Assistant Professor, Department of Marine Bio technology, AMET University, Chennai.

 

ABSTRACT:

Marine endophytic fungi  naturally belong to the marine ecosystem. Endophytic fungi from marine plants are adapted to salt tolerance. This  phenomenon induces the endophytic fungi to produce bioactive secondary metabolites against disease causing microorganisms. Hence marine endophytic fungi are different in potential compared with terrestrial endophytic fungi.

 

 

 

1. INTRODUCTION:

Endophytes are the potential producers of novel biological active compounds with immense value in the field of agriculture, medicine and industry (Tan et al., 2000; Tan and Zou, 2001;^[1][2] Shankar and Krishnamurthy, 2010, Aly et al., 2010^[4]). Endophytes are chemical synthesizer inside plants (Owen and Hundley, 2004)^[3] at the same time they play a role as a selection system for microbes to produce bioactive substances with low toxicity to higher organisms. There is still a significant demand of the drug industry for synthetic products due to economic and time-consuming reasons. But also bioactive natural compounds produced by endophytes have been promising potential usefulness in safety and human health concerns. Problems related to human health such as the development of drug resistance in human pathogenic bacteria, fungal infections, and life frightening virus claim for new remedial agents for effective treatment of diseases in human, plants, and animals that are presently unmet (Strobel and Daisy, 2003; Strobel, 2003; Zang et al., 2005)^{[5] [6] [7].}

 

2. Endophytic fungi as source of bioactive compounds:

A number of species of endophytic fungi have been identified as sources of anticancer, antidiabetic, insecticidal and immunosuppressive compound (Strobel and Daisy, 2003^[8]. Some of them may produce secondary metabolites with potential for antimicrobial or anticancer property. Several of them may produce secondary metabolites with potential for antimicrobial or anticancer property. An additional benefit of endophytes is to produce the same compound what their host gives when screening the plant. Hence few scientists believe that endophytes responsible for that compound synthesis. Therefore recent trends are towards the medicinal plants to search the novel endophytic fungi from these plants. The microbial colonization can be demonstrated to be internal, either through histological means, by isolation from strongly surface disinfected tissue, or more recently, through direct amplification of fungal nuclear DNA from colonized plant tissue^[9] (Li et al., 2005).

 

3. Endophytic fungi from medicinal plants:

The endophytes of medicinal plants, Gymnosperms and floral endophytes were already reported (Bacon and White, 2000; Saikkonen et al., 1998)^[10][11]. Many reports showed that plant microbe relationship of endophytes contributes substances that possess various types of bioactivity, such as antibacterial, antifungal, anticancer. The production of growth promoting factors and of metabolites from endophytic fungi is general useful in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industry (Petrini et al., 1991)^[12].

 

4. Endophytic fungi from marine plants:

The comparison with other habitats, overall, both endophytic fungi from marine habitats and obligate marine fungi are one of the least studied groups of fungi and therefore represent great potential for the discovery of new pharmacologically active metabolites (Kobayashi and Ishibashi, 1993)^[13]. The marine endophytic fungi may contain the potential to produce different types of compounds from those of terrestrial sources. Several endophytic fungi isolated from marine algae and plants have been found to produce interesting secondary metabolites. Hence several marine plants produce interesting secondary metabolites has led to the discovery of numerous bioactive compounds for antibacterial, antifungal, antimalarial, antitumor, antiviral purposes and other such pharmacologically useful compounds from them (Mayer and Hamann, 2004). But, there is no information whether these plants have endophytic fungi associated with them and if these are responsible for the production of such novel secondary metabolites (Bugni and Chris, 2004).

 

Endophytic microorganisms from marine plants have not been widely explored, and their bioactive compounds are not well documented (Ariffin et al., 2011)^[14]. For example, through 2005–2006, leptosins C and F (Yanagihara et al., 2005) and verrucarin A (Oda et al., 2005) were the only compounds from marine endophytic fungi to have their mechanisms of action against lymphoblastoid (RPMI18402) and promyelocytic leukemia (HL-60) cells, respectively, established, whereas numerous compounds remained undetermined. Changes in the metabolic profile during exposure to salinity are dependent on the genus, species, cultivar and developmental stage of the plants (Bernstein et al., 2010; Atkinson and Urwin, 2012)^[15][16].  Recent studies have shown the prospective of halophytes as a source of medicinal valuable secondary metabolites with likely economic value (Ksouri et al., 2012; Buhmann and Papenbrock, 2013)^[17]. However, the direct experimental evidence of increases in the concentration of valuable secondary metabolites and the antioxidant production of capacity in halophytes as a consequence of altering the salinity of the growing environment yet not understood^[18][19]. Since halophytes differ widely in their degree of salt tolerance and natural growth rate (Flowers et al., 1977; Ungar, 1991).

 

5. CONCLUSION:

Endophytic fungi are innovative to find the novel applications because of their identity is novel to the researchers and also their diversity in different ecology of all the plants of the Earth. Hence endophytic fungi finding from different habitat of plants could be useful to the society in varying ways.

 

6. REFERENCES:

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17.   Ksouri, R., Ksouri, W.M., Jallali I., Debez, A., Magne, C., Hiroko, I., Abdelly, C. Medicinal halophytes: potent source of health promoting biomolecules with medical, nutraceutical and food applications. Critical Reviews in Biotechnology. 2012; 32:289–326.

18.   Muthezhilan, R., Vinoth, S., Gopi, K., and Jaffar Hussain, A. Dye Degrading Potential of Immobilized Laccase from Endophytic Fungi of Coastal Sand Dune Plants. International Journal of ChemTech Research. 2014; 6(9), 4154-4160.

19.   Jayaprakashvel, M., Sankar, K., Venkatramani, M., and Hussain, A. J. Morphometrics and Germrination Biology of Seeds from Two Coastal Sand Dune Plants of South East Coast of India.

 

 

 

 

 

Accepted on 22.10.2017        © RJPT All right reserved

Research J. Pharm. and Tech 2017; 10(10):3635-3636.