Recent studies have demonstrated that
3-O-methylfunicone (OMF), a fungal secondary metabolite from Talaromyces pinophilus belonging to the class of
funicone-like compounds, has
antiviral activity against canine coronaviruses (CCoV), which causes
enteritis in dogs. Herein, we selected two additional
funicone-like compounds named
vermistatin (VER) and penisimplicissin (PS) and investigated their inhibitory activity towards CCoV
infection. Thus, both compounds have been tested for their cytotoxicity and for
antiviral activity against CCoV in A72 cells, a
fibrosarcoma cell line suitable for investigating CCoV. Our findings showed an increase in cell viability, with an improvement of morphological features in CCoV-infected cells at the non-toxic doses of 1 μM for VER and 0.5 μM for PS. In addition, we observed that these compounds caused a strong inhibition in the expression of the
aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), a
ligand-activated
transcription factor which is activated during CCoV
infection. Our results also showed the alkalinization of lysosomes in the presence of VER or PS, which may be involved in the observed
antiviral activities.