Anticancer activity of fungal endophytes from Datura stramonium on two human cancer cell lines

Datura stramonium is a medicinal plant of the Solanaceae family. The plant is known to produce toxic alkaloids which include atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine. The data sets herein represent the findings from the isolation of fungal endophytes from the stems, leaves and seeds of D. stramonium.

Eleven fungal endophytes were recovered from the plant and the internal transcribed spacer region (ITS1 and ITS4) of each isolate was sequenced and the data was deposited in GenBank. Accession numbers of each fungal isolate and the phylogeny reconstruction are all shown in Supplementary File 1.

Ethyl acetate crude extracts from the fungal isolates were screened for anticancer activity on two human cancer cell lines (UMG87 glioblastoma cells and A549 lung carcinoma cells) using the MTS [3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-5-(3-carboxymethoxyphenyl)-2-(4-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium] assay. The crude extract from the fungal endophyte Alternaria sp. KTDL7 was found to be cytotoxic on UMG87 glioblastoma cells while the other fungal extracts showed limited anti-proliferation activity on both cell lines. The data cytotoxicity experiments is shown in Supplemetary File 2 and 3.

Untargeted secondary metabolite screening for Alternaria sp. KTDL7 was done using LC-QTOF-MS/MS and the data is shown in Supplementary File 4.