New Antiinfective Compounds from the Screening of a Fungal Extract Library

Danielle Demers,¹ Renee Fleeman,² Ala Azhari,³ Ashley Souza,³ Dennis E. Kyle,³ Lindsey N. Shaw,² Bill J. Baker¹

1Department of Chemistry and Center for Drug Discovery and Innovation, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, 2Department of Cell Biology, Microbiology and Molecular Biology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, 3Department of Global Health, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33613

Emerging resistance to nearly all antiinfective drugs on the market have accelerated the need for new chemical entities that can be used to treat infections. From parasites to bacteria, drug resistant pathogens are an immediate threat to human health. Natural products have long played important roles as antimicrobial agents, and we continue to look to secondary metabolites for new and novel drugable entities. By screening a library of fungal metabolites in phenotypic assays across a large range of targets, a suite of new chromene containing compounds were discovered. These compounds exhibited interesting activity against the drug resistant bacteria Staphylococcus aureus or the parasite Leishmania donovani depending on functionalization of the benzene ring substructure.