The fungus Aspergillus flavus is known for its ability to produce the toxic and carcinogenic aflatoxins in food and feed. While aflatoxins are of most concern, A. flavus is predicted to be capable of producing many more metabolites based on a study of its complete genome sequence. Some of these metabolites could be of great importance in food and feed safety. Here we describe an analytical methodology based on Orbitrap HRMS technology that allows the untargeted determination of fungal metabolites, in support of the study of the function of genes involved in secondary metabolism in fungi. The applied strategy implies the detection and identification of differentially expressed metabolites in extracts of wild-type and mutant fungal strains, using Orbitrap high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) accurate mass data. The suitability of this approach was demonstrated by the confirmation of previously characterised genes involved in the aflatoxin biosynthetic pathway, namely a polyketide synthase (pksA), an oxidoreductase (ordA) and a methyltransferase (omtA) gene. Subsequently, the proposed methodology was applied for the detection and identification of metabolites produced by a yet uncharacterised gene cluster in A. favus, cluster 23. Comparative Orbitrap HRMS analysis of extracts of A. flavus wild-type strain and an over-expression mutant for the transcription factor of gene cluster 23 (lepE) demonstrated that this gene cluster is responsible for the production a set of 2-pyridone derivatives, the leporins. Besides the known derivatives leporin B and leporin B precursor that could be identified by automatic de-replication of the accurate mass data, five other compounds belonging to this class of fungal secondary metabolites were detected and identified for the first time, combining MS and multiple-stage MS data.
Keywords: Aspergillus spp.; comparative metabolomics; gene function; high-resolution mass spectrometry.