Chloe Pan
Research Mentor: Marcy Balunas
Mentor Department: Microbiology and Immunology, Medicine
Author(s): Chloe Pan, Katie McBride, Jennifer Nguyen, Marcy Balunas
Session: Session 5 (2:00 PM – 2:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 29
Abstract
Pseudonocardia sp. JKS2562 is a bacterial strain found on the proplural plate of fungus growing ants, Trachymyrmex sepentrionalis, in a symbiotic relationship that protects the ants from fungal pathogens. Pseudonocardia is historically quite difficult to grow in high yield due to its slow-growing nature and specific nutritional needs. Therefore, this research project’s main goal was to determine a method to grow large volumes of the strain in liquid culture, where a fungal pathogen would be added to elicit production of antifungal secondary metabolites. One such metabolite includes a lassopeptide, which was previously shown to have potential as an antimicrobial agent, although more study is needed to determine its mechanisms of action. To elicit such metabolites, we designed a type of co-culture experiment that consists of growing Pseudonocardia in media with metabolites from pathogenic fungi. One aim of this project was to show that when Pseudonocardia is grown in the presence of a pathogen like Trichoderma virens it will produce more metabolites of interest than it would when growing on its own. After developing new culturing methods, the strain was able to grow in large-scale liquid culture, and we plan to use these new methods to expand into further Pseudonocardia monocultures and pathogenic co-cultures in order to perform comparative analyses. Bacterial metabolites will be extracted from these mono- and co-cultures, and the production of lassopeptides and other metabolites will be analyzed using LC-MS and further isolated using HPLC fractionation methods. This will provide insight on how certain co-culture conditions can potentially increase the production of antifungal metabolites, which may allow for their future applications to antifungal drug discovery.
