Plants are primary source of natural product drugs. However, with every new bioactive molecule reported from a plant source, there follows reports of endangered status or even extinction of a medicinally important plant due to over-harvesting. Hence, the attention turned towards fungi namely the endophytes, which reside within medicinally important plants and thus may have acquired their medicinal properties. Strobilanthes crispus is a traditional medicinal plant which has been used traditionally to treat kidney stones, diabetes, hypertension and cancer as well as having antimicrobial activities. In our efforts to bioprospect for anticancer and antimicrobial metabolites, two fungal endophytes most closely related to the Sordariomycetes sp. showed promising results. Sample (PDA)BL3 showed highest significant antimicrobial activity against 6 bacteria at 200 µg/disc whereas sample (PDA)BL5 has highest significant anticancer activity against all 5 cancer cell lines at concentrations ranging from 30 to 300 μg/ml. As for the gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) results, a total of 20 volatile metabolites identified from sample (PDA)BL3 and 21 volatile metabolites identified from sample (PDA)BL5 having more than 1% abundance. Both GC-MS analysis showed that compound Pyrrolo[1,2-a]pyrazine-1,4-dione, hexahydro-3-(2-methylpropyl) has the highest abundance at 15.10% abundance for sample (PDA)BL3 and 19.00% abundance for sample (PDA)BL5 respectively. In conclusion, these results have shown bio-prospecting potential of endophytic fungi having antimicrobial and anticancer activities as well as its potential secondary metabolites of interest. Therefore, this work has further indicated the medicinal and industrial potential of endophytic fungi.
Global warming is the main concern in today's century as it comes with numerous side effects to the natural environment. Open Top Chambers (OTC) consist of metal constructions with transparent vertical side-walls and a frustum on top. An opening in the middle of the frustum allows an air exchange to reduce temperature and humidity effects in the chamber. The size of the open top chamber which is located in Universiti Putra Malaysia is slanted 60 o , 50cm tall, 2.08m basal diameter hexagon chamber. The Open Top Chamber experiments were carried out to determine how much global warming has affected and is still affecting the temperature, pH, the moisture and the growth of the microbes in the tropical soil. The aim of this study is to elucidate the effects of temperature increase on the soil microbes' population and on the pH of the soil. The study was conducted to observe the effect of heat on the population of soil microbes and the pH of the soil which was collected on the same day for 6 consecutive months. The microbes from the samples were grown on agar plates. The population of microbes on the plates were used as values were for Colony Forming Unit (CFU) value calculations. The effects of OTCs on mean temperature showed a large range of CFU values throughout the 6 months but did not differ significantly between studies. Increases in mean monthly and diurnal temperature were strongly related, indicating that the presence of warming effect by the OTCs. Such predictive power allows a better mechanistic understanding of observed biotic response to experimental warming. This study will be useful for the understanding of the global warming effect on microbes. The Open Top Chamber experiment has proven to be one of the effective model for global warming research and data collected especially on the growth of soil microbial obtained would be of great use for further experiments.
Bacterial endophytes are found on all types of plants and is a potential source of bioactive compounds which can be utilized to fight against multi-resistant pathogens and could be further develop into new leads for antibiotic development. However, the research done on the bacterial endophytes is relatively new and has potential to grow as it is theorized that each plant has one or more bacterial endophytes inhabiting them. This review aims to review the studies that have been done previously and give new insights on the latest trends in this field of research.
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