The research team composed of Biological Sciences Professor Thomas Edison E. Dela Cruz, Dr. rer. nat., Graduate School student Carlo Chris S. Apurillo, and Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Lei Cai, recently won an Outstanding Scientific Paper award from the National Academy of Science and Technology.
The study entitled “Diversity and bioactivities of mangrove fungal endophytes from Leyte and Samar, Philippines” was published in July 2019 in Philippine Science Letters. It investigated mangrove fungal endophytes (MFEs), which are considered “viable sources of metabolites with potential antibacterial and cytotoxic properties.”
The study isolated 73 MFEs from 4 mangrove hosts in Leyte and Samar, Eastern Philippines, with “R. mucronata from Samar having the highest MFE diversity and species richness.” The undertaking provided “the first report of the MFEs from the central part of the Philippines and the discovery of potential metabolites which can be explored for pharmaceutical applications.”
Dela Cruz heads the Fungal Biodiversity, Ecogenomics, and Systematics Group at the Research Center for the Natural and Applied Sciences.
