Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Extremophiles https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-020-01161-5 ORIGINAL PAPER Fungi in glacial ice of Antarctica: diversity, distribution and bioprospecting of bioactive compounds Graciéle Cunha Alves de Menezes 1  · Bárbara Alves Porto 1  · Soraya Sander Amorim 1  · Carlos Leomar Zani 2  · Tânia Maria de Almeida Alves 2  · Policarpo Ademar Sales Junior 2  · Silvane Maria Fonseca Murta 2  · Jeferson Cardia Simões 3  · Betania Barros Cota 2  · Carlos Augusto Rosa 1  · Luiz Henrique Rosa 1 Received: 5 December 2019 / Accepted: 21 February 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract We identifed cultivable fungi present in the glacial ice fragments collected in nine sites across Antarctica Peninsula and assessed their abilities to produce bioactive compounds. Three ice fragments with approximately 20 kg were collected, melted and 3 L fltered through of 0.45 µm sterilized membranes, which were placed on the media Sabouraud agar and minimal medium incubated at 10 °C. We collected 66 isolates classifed into 27 taxa of 14 genera. Penicillium palitans, Penicillium sp. 1, Thelebolus balaustiformis, Glaciozyma antarctica, Penicillium sp. 7, Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, and Rhodotorula dairenensis had the highest frequencies. The diversity and richness of the fungal community were high with moderate dominance. Penicillium species were present in all samples, with Penicillium chrysogenum showing the broadest distribu- tion. P. chrysogenum, P. palitans, and Penicillium spp. had trypanocidal, leishmanicidal, and herbicidal activities, with P. chrysogenum having the broadest and highest capability. 1 H NMR signals revealed the presence of highly functionalized secondary metabolites in the bioactive extracts. Despite extreme environmental conditions, glacial ice harbours a diverse fungal community, including species never before recorded in the Arctic and Antarctica. Among them, Penicillium taxa may represent wild fungal strains with genetic and biochemical pathways that may produce new secondary bioactive metabolites. Keywords Antarctica · Ice · Fungi · Secondary metabolites Introduction Antarctica is one of the most pristine regions in the world where diferent extreme environmental conditions occur, which ofer unique opportunities to study the biology of extremophiles (Rosa et al. 2019). Among the environments of Antarctica, the Antarctic ice sheet represents the largest volume of glacial ice on the planet, providing an unknown ecosystem where biotic factors require special biochemi- cal mechanisms to survive in low temperatures, low water activity and nutrient availability conditions, and exposure to high levels of solar radiation (Anesio and Laybourn-Parry 2012; de Menezes et al. 2019a). The biome of icy environ- ments seems to be dominated by microorganisms (Sonjak et al. 2006; Duo Saito et al. 2018; Perini et al. 2019a, b), which seem to play an important ecological role under the limit of life (Margesin and Collins 2019). In Antarctica, few studies have been conducted to recover and identify fungal species in glacial ice and only a few species of the genera Alternaria, Aspergillus, Aureobasidium, Candida, Curviba- sidium, Cystoflobasidium, Davidiella, Penicillium, Crypto- coccus, Leucosporodium, Pseudozyma, Trichoderma, and Rhodotorula have been characterized (Jacobs et al. 1964; Abyzov et al. 2004; D’Elia et al. 2009; Knowlton et al. 2013; Sanyal et al. 2018). In addition, the glacial Antarctic ice Communicated by A. Oren. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-020-01161-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Luiz Henrique Rosa lhrosa@icb.ufmg.br 1 Departamento de Microbiologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG CEP 31270-901, Brazil 2 Instituto René Rachou, FIOCRUZ-MG, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil 3 Centro Polar e Climático, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil