LAUSR

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in east Asia is a unique and distinctive permafrost environment and represents an extreme environment for special microbial resources [1]. The fungus Aspergillus terreus is known to produce lovastatin, which became the cholesterol-lowering drug in humans. Besides lovastatin, A. terreus produces a number of biologically active compounds such as sulochrins, terretonins, asterriquinones, and butyrolactones [2, 3]. In the course of our investigations on soil fungi collected from the Tibet plateau as sources of novel biologically active secondary metabolites, we have studied the secondary metabolites of Aspergillus terreus isolated from the Tibet plateau and obtained 15 compounds. Compound 1 was first isolated from natural products. Compounds 9 and 13 were isolated from Aspergillus for the first time. Some compounds showed significant antimicrobial activities. The structures of these compounds were identified by spectroscopic methods, including NMR and mass spectrometry, to be decanoic acid (2,2-dimethyl-1,3-dioxolan-4-yl)methyl ester (1) [4], 4,5-dimethylresorcinol (2) [5], indole-3-acetic acid (3) [6], aspulvinone H (4) [7], dihydroisoflavipucine (5) [8], 14-hydroxyterezine D (6) [9], terezine D (7) [10], cyclo-[L-(4hydroxyprolinyl)-L-leucine] (8) [11], R(–)-glycerol monolinoleate (9) [12], 5 ,8 -epidioxyergosta-6,22-dien-3 -ol (10) [13], ergosterol (11) [14], butyrolactone I (12) [15], and lactariamide B (13) [16].