Evaluation of the employment of endophytic fungi obtained from plants and of filamentous fungi obtained from soil in the obtaining of pharmacologically active chiral metabolites

• Grant number: 09/06132-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: October 01, 2009
• End date: September 30, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Chemistry - Analytical Chemistry
• Principal Investigator: Anderson Rodrigo Moraes de Oliveira
• Grantee: Anderson Rodrigo Moraes de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ribeirão Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The use of fungi in the process of biotransformation of drugs can lead to the discovery of highly relevant information in biotechnology, such as the discovery of new drugs, the development of new methodologies to obtain drugs in their enantiomeric pure form and the development of new methods to obtain metabolites, especially pharmacologically active metabolites. Moreover, the use of fungi in biotransformation processes allows to investigate large number of crops on a small scale. Another advantage is that the manipulation of the conditions of cultivation of fungi may lead to the formation of larger amount of metabolites of interest with low production cost. Despite all these advantages, the use of fungi in the biotransformation of drugs has been little exploited, mainly in Brazil, where there is a huge number of species yet little studied, for example, the endophytic fungi obtained from various plants, such as the Viguieira arenaria (Guimarães et al., 2008). Thus, this project aims to assess the ability of several fungi found in Brazil in metabolizing drugs that have stereoselective properties, such as albendazole and risperidone. These drugs were selected because they are widely used in clinical and they yield pharmacologically active metabolites. In addition, this project also aims to developed analytical methods that are almost free or free of the use of organic solvent. Based on this, it will be employed capillary electrophoresis and liquid phase microextraction in the method development. (AU)