Antioxidant Activities of Bacterial Culture Extracts Isolated from Arctic Lichens

Abstract

Lichens are a symbiosis between fungi, algae and cyanobacteria. Our group recently studied the antioxidant properties of some bacterial species isolated from Arctic lichens and we confirmed that they possess high antioxidant activities. In this paper, we investigated the antioxidant capacity of 5 microorganisms newly isolated from 4 Arctic lichen species, Cladonia sp., Sterocaulon sp., Umbilicaria sp. and Cetraria sp., using various solvent extractions. We carried out 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2-azino-bis(3-ethyl benzothiazoline- 6-sulphonic acid) (ABTS) free radical scavenging activity test and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assay. Also total phenolic and flavonoid content assays were performed. Among the bacterial culture extracts of the tested lichen-microorganisms, ethyl acetate extracts of Burkholderia sordidicola S5- B(T) had not only a high antioxidant activity (72.9%) when compared with the ascorbic acid used as the control (51.3%) in the DPPH assay, but also a high amount of phenolic content as well as flavonoid content. As a result, these lichen-microorganisms may be potentially useful sources of natural antioxidants.