Abstract:In the past few decades groups of scientists have focused their study on relatively new microorganisms called endophytes. By definition these microorganisms, mostly fungi and bacteria, colonise the intercellular spaces of the plant tissues. The mutual relationship between endophytic microorganisms and their host plants, taxanomy and ecology of endophytes are being studied. Some of these microorganisms produce bioactive secondary metabolites that may be involved in a host-endophyte relationship. Recently, many endophytic bioactive metabolites, known as well as new substances, possesing a wide variety of biological activities as antibiotic, antitumor, antiinflammatory, antioxidant, etc. have been identified. The microorganisms such as endophytes may be very interesting for biotechnological production of bioactive substances as medicinally important agents. Therefore the aim of this review is to briefly characterize endophytes and summarize the structuraly different bioactive secondary metabolites produced by endophytic microorganisms as well as microbial sources of these metabolites and their host plants.
Proteases play a regulatory role in a variety of pathologies including cancer, pancreatitis, thromboembolic disorders, viral infections and many others. One of the possible strategies how to combat with these pathologies seems to be the use of low molecular inhibitors. Natural products were evaluated in the in vitro antiprotease assay on serine proteases (trypsin, thrombin and urokinase) and on the cysteine protease cathepsin B. We found interesting results for -ursolic acid isolated from Salvia officinalis, which significantly inhibited all tested proteases in vitro in the micromolar range. -Ursolic acid showed the strongest inhibition activity to urokinase (IC 50 = 12 μm) and cathepsin B (IC 50 = 10 μm) as proteases included in tumour invasion and metastasis indicated possible anticancer effectivity. Therefore, we tested the ability of -ursolic acid at doses of 50, 75 and 100 mg/kg given i.p. to inhibit lung colonization of B16 mouse melanoma cells in vivo. We found, that -ursolic acid significantly decreased the number of B16 colonies in the lungs of mice at the dose 50 mg/kg (p Ͻ 0.05).
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