Until recently,little was known about the fungi found in shark gills and their biomedicinal potential. In this article,we described the isolation,bioactivity,diversity,and secondary metabolites of bioactive fungi from the gill of a shark(Carcharodon carcharias). A total of 115 isolates were obtained and grown in 12 culture media. Fifty-eight of these isolates demonstrated significant activity in four antimicrobial,pesticidal,and cytotoxic bioassay models. Four randomly selected bioactive isolates inhibited human cancer cell proliferation during re-screening. These active isolates were segregated into 6 genera using the internal transcribed spacer-large subunit(ITS-LSU) rDNA-sequence BLAST comparison. Four genera,Penicillium,Aspergillus,Mucor,and Chaetomium were the dominant taxa. A phylogenic tree illustrated their intergenera and intragenera genetic diversity. HPLC-DAD-HRMS analysis and subsequent database searching revealed that nine representative strains produced diverse bioactive compound profiles. These results detail the broad range of bioactive fungi found in a shark's gills,revealing their biopharmaceutical potential. To the best of our knowledge,this is the first study characterizing shark gill fungi and their bioactivity.
