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Objective: To attempt discovering new bioactive metabolites from fungal sources., Methods: The exploratory study was conducted at the Department of Microbiology, Federal Urdu University for Arts, Science and Technology, Karachi from January 2016 to November 2017and comprised of soil samples collected from rhizosphere region of different garden plants from the city. Fungi were screened for production of antibiotics by testing cell-free culture filtrates obtained by Shake-flask fermentation technique. Agar-Well diffusion assay method was used to evaluate antagonistic activity against pathogenic microorganisms., Results: Bioactive compounds extracted by ethyl acetate and thin layer chromatography revealed mixture of compounds in the crude extract. AspergillusterreusMK-1 showed significant inhibition of medically important test pathogens namely Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichiacoli, Salmonella typhi, Micrococcus luteus, Streptococcus epidermidis, Bacillus subtilis, Candida albicans and Aspergillusniger. The best biological activity of crude ethyl acetate extract was observed against Pseudomonas aeruginosa (63mm)., Conclusions: Newly isolated AspergillusterreusMK-1 emerged as a potent candidate for the production of antimicrobial compounds.

HBS1L-MYB intergenic polymorphism (HMIP) on chromosome 6q23 is associated with elevated fetal hemoglobin levels and has pleiotropic effects on several hematologic parameters. To investigate potential regulatory activity in the region, we have measured sensitivity of the sequences to DNase I cleavage that identified 3 tissue-specific DNase I hypersensitive sites in the core intergenic interval. Chromatin immunoprecipitation with microarray (ChIP-chip) analysis showed strong histone acetylation in a defined interval of 65 kb corresponding to the core HBS1L-MYB intergenic region in primary human erythroid cells but not in non-MYB-expressing HeLa cells. ChIP-chip analysis also identified several potential cis-regulatory elements as strong GATA-1 signals that coincided with the DNase I hypersensitive sites present in MYB-expressing erythroid cells. We suggest that HMIP contains regulatory sequences that could be important in hematopoiesis by controlling MYB expression. This study provides the functional link between genetic association of HMIP with control of fetal hemoglobin and other hematologic parameters. We also present a large-scale analysis of histone acetylation as well as RNA polymerase II and GATA-1 interactions on chromosome 6q, and alpha and beta globin gene loci. The data suggest that GATA-1 regulates numerous genes of various functions on chromosome 6q.