[Bioactivity of endophytic actinomycetes from medicinal plants and secondary metabolites from strain D62]

It is believed that genetic recombination of the endophytes with the hosts that occurred in evolutionary time could result in some endophytes producing certain phytochemical originally characteristic of the host. Based on this widely accepted hypothesis, there have been increasing research efforts focused on screening for novel natural products from endophytes. In this study, antimicrobial and antitumor activities of 165 actinomycetes isolated from medicinal plants collected from Xishuangbanna were tested by agar diffusion method and WST-8 assay respectively. The results showed that over 42% of the isolates exhibited antagonism against pathogenic strains, and 54.5% displayed excellent inhibition against mouse melanoma cell line B16 or/and human alveolar epithelial cell line A549. These results are superior to those of soil actinomycetes, indicating tremendous potential of endophytic of actinomycetes for exploration. Six compounds that had both antimicrobial and antitumor activities were separated and purified from isolate Streptomyces sp. D62 by resin adsorption, silica-gel column and sephadex chromatography, etc. On the basis of spectral analyses, they were identified as antimycin A4a (1), antimycin A7a (2), antimycin A2a (3), antimycin A1a (4), 10-hydroxy-10-methyl-dodec-2-en-1,4-olide (5) and 6-(2-(4-aminophenyl)-2-oxoethyl)-3,5-dimethyl-tetrahydropyran-2-one(6), with the last one defined as a novel compound. Based on all these results, it is convinced that endophytic actinomycetes are a promising resource for bioactive natural product discovery.