Name: Birgit Arndt
Diploma / M.Sc degree: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
(October 2013)

PhD Project: Identification, structure elucidation and biosynthetic pathway of unknown secondary metabolites in Fusarium spp

Abstract of Research Project

Secondary metabolites of fungi can have both advantages and disadvantages for humans. Alexander Fleming discovered the possibility of a fungal strain to produce an antibiotic compound, named Penicillin, which has been established as a useful antibiotic in human healthcare. But also toxic metabolites can be produced by moulds, e.g. Aflatoxin B1, which was recently present in the German media due to presumably contaminated animal feed. Therefore it is important to screen the metabolite-spectrum of fungi to prevent health risks and to find new potential bioactive components.

The project will focus on the identification of new and unknown secondary metabolites in Fusarium fujikuroi. This is an ascomycetous fungus which is responsible for the “bakanae” disease on rice that results in poor harvests. Since the genome of this fungus has been fully sequenced, the number of secondary metabolite-producing genes is known, but only about 30 % of their products have been identified so far. For this reason there is a high potential for the discovery of new metabolites within this fungus.

In cooperation with the Institute of Botany at the University of Münster, some of these gene clusters will be deleted or overexpressed to find significant differences between their metabolite spectra and those of the wild type. Therefore HPLC-HRMS in combination with software tools will be used to compare the mass spectrometric profiles and to identify the resulting metabolites.