Novel resources of Taxol from endophytic and entomopathogenic fungi: Isolation, characterization and LC-Triple mass spectrometric quantification.

This work presents a second-to-none method for Taxol isolation from the Endophytic fungus Cladosporium sphaerospermum (AUMC 6896) and the Entomopathogenic fungus Metarizium anisopliae (AUMC 5130). The extracts were analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and Liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) using positive electrospray ionization (ESI) in the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode. This is rapid, consistent, reproducible, accurate, and sensitive for quantifying Taxol across multiple samples. The yield of crude Taxol product obtained from Potato Dextrose broth (PDB) medium inoculated with Cladosporium sphaerospermu and Metarizium anisopliae was found to be 3.732, and 0.0023 μg L-1 respectively. The yield can be improved by adding ammonium acetate or salicylic acid to the culture broth. Addition of ammonium acetate (AA) (20 mg L-1) to culture media resulted in an increase of Taxol yield to 30.365 and 27.289 μg L-1 respectively. Production of Taxol was 29.844 and 67.254 μg L-1 for the two fungus species when ammonium acetate was substituted by 90 mg L-1 salicylic acid (SA). Adding both AA (20 mg L-1) and SA (90 mg L-1) to the culture media resulted in an increase of the Taxol yield to 4.054 and 116.373 μg L-1 respectively. Our proposed analytical method offers very fast (3 min) quantitation of Taxol in comparison with other published methods. These findings represent a new bioprospecting of the endophytic fungi that may serve as a potential material for the production of Taxol for anticancer treatment.