Tapping the Unexplored Potential of Marine Fungi and Edible Mushrooms for in Silico Screening of Anti-Viral Bioactive Compounds Against SARS-CoV-2 for Rapid Development of Nutraceuticals

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS- CoV-2) affects human respiratory function that causes COVID-19 disease. COVID-19 has spread rapidly all over the world and became a pandemic within no time. Therefore, it is the need of hour to screen potential lead candidates from natural resources like edible mushrooms and marine fungi. These natural resources are very less explored till now and known to be the source for many medicinal compounds with several health benefits. These medicinal compounds can be easily exploited for the faster development of nutraceuticals for controlling SARS-CoV-2 infections. Our in-silico research suggests that bioactive compounds originating from mushroom and marine fungi shows strong potential to interact with ACE2 receptor or main protease of SARS-CoV-2, showing the inhibition activity towards the enzymatic protease. We performed a series of in silico studies for the validation of our results, which includes Molecular docking, drug likeness property investigation by Swiss ADME tools, MD simulation, and thermodynamically stable free binding energy calculation. Overall, these results suggest that Ganodermadiol and Heliantriol F bioactive compounds originating from edible mushroom has strong potential to be developed as low-cost nutraceutical against SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. The drug candidate isolated from marine fungi and edible mushroom are highly unexplored for the development of potential alternative drug against SARS-CoV-2 virus with minimum side effects. That is why we decided to screen some active metabolites from the marine fungi and mushrooms, which offer some encouraging results. Though our in-silico studies of these compounds are showing a promising result against SARS-CoV-2 main protease and ACE2 receptor binding domain, the effectiveness of these bioactive compounds should be further validated by proper clinical trials.