View article

Endophytes including bacteria and fungi produce an array of biologically active secondary metabolites. Different approaches have been applied in order to increase the probability production of new metabolites including mimicking the environment, media and the microbes. However, the use of single culture usually re-produces known compounds with known bioactivities. Therefore, co-culturing between Streptomyces sp. strain SUK10 and Fusarium sp. in the same media at different growth stages leads to direct interaction which may trigger the expression of “silent” biosynthetic pathway to produce novel secondary metabolites. In this study, we elicited the production of the unknown secondary metabolites from co-culture extracts by using high resolution liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, while data was processed by utilizing the quantitative expression analysis software MZmine 2.40. 1 and SIMCA P+ 15.0 coupled with macro analysis and supported with DNP database for dereplication studies. The results showed that only the extract from co-culture of F7S15 showed enhances antibacterial activity on the Gram-positive bacteria with minimum inhibition concentration (MIC) values of 5 mg/mL and 10 mg/mL against Micrococcus sp. and Staphylococcus aureus, respectively, compared with their independent and other co-culture extracts were non-active. However, all extracts were non-active on the Gram-negative bacteria. Our preliminary results showed that the potential of co-culture method leading the production of novel metabolites which could be explored for future antibacterial agents.