Study On Bioactivities Of Lipids Extracted From Selected Species Of Slime Molds

Abstract

Lipids, specifically fatty acids and monoglycerides, have emerged as new and potential objects due to their pharmaceutical properties. Slime molds are a group of fungus – like protozoans. One of their trophic stages is plasmodium. In liquid medium, plasmodia are fragmented into microplasmodia. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one report on bioactivities of plasmodial lipid extract, and there has not been study on bioactivities of microplasmodial lipid extracts from slime molds. Therefore, the main objective of this project was to evaluate bioactivities of lipids extracts of microplasmodia of Physarum polycephalum. Lipid extracts from plasmodia of P. polycephalum and Physarella oblonga were also included for comparisons. Microbial activities of the lipid extracts were evaluated using well diffusion assay. Both the lipid samples isolated from plasmodia and microplasmodia of P. polycephalum showed weak inhibitory activities toward Staphylococcus aureus at the concentration 100 mg/mL and displayed no activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida albicans. Regarding antioxidant activity, the highest DPPH radical scavenging rate was exhibited by Phy. oblonga plasmodial lipid sample, followed by that of microplasmodial lipids of P. polycephalum. At the concentration of 150 mg/mL, these samples accounted for 74.36% and 67.95% of the DPPH radical scavenging activities, respectively while P. polycephalum plasmodial lipids showed the inhibitory rate of only 59.69%. In addition, cytotoxicity of the extracts done by SRB assay showed that at the concentration of 100 µg/mL, micoplasmodial lipids of P. polycephalum could inhibit 20,62% on Jurkat cell, which is significantly higher than other samples. Generally, this study generated a first set of data on bioactivities of crude lipids extracted from microplasmodia of P. polycephalum. The data suggested that the microplasmodial lipids would be worth further investigation in cytotoxicity toward Jurkat cells.