Intra-specific differentiation of fungal endosymbiont Alternaria longissima CLB44 using RNA secondary structure analysis and their anti-infective potential

New antimicrobial agents derived from endosymbio-tic fungi with unique and targeted mode of action are crucially rudimentary to combat multidrug-resistant infections. Most of the fungi isolated as endosymbionts show close morphological feature resemblance to plant pathogenic or free-living forms, and it is difficult to differentiate these different lifestyles. A fungal endosymbiont strain CLB44 was isolated from Combretum latifolium Blume (Combretaceae). CLB44 was then identified as Alternaria longissima based on morphological and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) intervening 5.8S rRNA gene sequence analysis. ITS2 RNA secondary structure analysis was carried out using mfold server with temperature 37 °C, and anti-infective potential was determined by MIC and disk diffusion methods. ITS2 RNA secondary structure analysis clearly distinguished endosymbiotic A. longissima CLB44 from free-living and pathogenic A. longissima members in the same monophyletic clade. Secondary metabolites produced effectively inhibited Pseudomonas aeruginosa (25 μg/ml), Escherichia coli (25 μg/ml), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (50 μg/ml), Candida albicans (100 μg/ml), and other human pathogens. This study emerges as an innovative finding that explores newly revealed ITS2 RNAs that may be an insight as new markers for refining phylogenetic relations and to distinguish fungal endosymbionts with other free-living or pathogenic forms. A. longissima CLB44, in the emerging field of endosymbionts, will pave the way to a novel avenue in drug discovery to combat multidrug-resistant infections. The sequence data of this fungus is deposited in GenBank under the accession no. KU310611.