Recycling Fish Heads for the Production of Prodigiosin, a Novel Fungicide via Experimental and Molecular Docking Characterization

Abstract

This report aims to characterize and reuse fish head powder (FHP) as a potential carbon/nitrogen source for microbial fermentation to produce prodigiosin (PG), and to evaluate its novel anti-fungal effect via an experimental and docking study. FHP has high protein (30.25%) and lipid (5.12%) content and a diversity of elements, which suggests that FHP is a potential substrate for microbial fermentation. Serratia marcescens TNU01 was screened as the most effective strain to produce PG from FHP. Further experiments indicated that the combination of FHP and crude chitin at the ratio of 9/1 and used at 1.5% as a C/N source for fermentation significantly enhanced PG production. Supplementing a minor amount of 0.05% Ca3(PO4)2, 0.03% K2SO4 also positively affects PG yield production. The fermentation using a bioreactor system (type of 14 L) achieved the highest PG yield production (6.4 mg/mL) in a short cultivation time (10 h) in comparison with the highest PG yield (5.8 mg/mL) obtained after 36 h of fermentation in a flask. In the anti-fungal evaluation of various plant pathogen fungal strains, PG demonstrated efficacy against Fusarium solani F04. The molecular docking results also showed that PG effectively interacted with targeting protein 3QPC of F. solani with good binding energy (DS—9.2 kcal/mol) and an acceptable RMSD value (0.94 Å). In this study, we provide a novel application of FHP for the eco-friendly production of PG, which can potentially used for the management of Fusarium solani.