Traditional herbalists have been relied on for many years by Algerians to cure a wide range of diseases. Regardless of their nutritional values, mushrooms have chemical properties that make them attractive, beneficial, and more likely to be studied by researchers, according to ethnobotanical literature on traditional phytotherapy. Among all the edible mushrooms, tubers are a type of fungus that are traditionally used in fine dining and have garnered attention recently because of their many therapeutic applications. This research delves into a meticulous analysis of bioactive constituents in Bunium bulbocastanum tubers, sourced from Mostaganem and Relizane regions, with a keen focus on polyphenols, flavonoids, and condensed tannins. The quantification of total phenolic content was executed through the Folin-Ciocalteu assay, while flavonoids were assessed via the aluminum chloride colorimetric method. In addition, condensed tannins were evaluated in this study. Antioxidant capacities were scrutinized employing the 2,2′-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging assay. Microbial inhibition studies were conducted against five benchmark bacterial strains, utilizing the agar disc diffusion technique. Furthermore, a comprehensive liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) analysis was performed to identify and quantify bioactive compounds. The findings underscore that the Mostaganem extracts were particularly rich in polyphenols (11.65 mg GAE/g of extract) and tannins (1.30 mg CE/g of extract), while the Relizane extracts boasted significant flavonoid concentrations (9.421 mg QE/g of extract). Notably, 4-methylguaiacol (82.04 mg/L), caffeic acid dimethyl ether (27.76 mg/L), syringic acid (20.48 mg/L), and naringenin (16.05 mg/L) emerged as the predominant volatile compounds. Compositional investigation of the extracts by LC–MS confirmed the presence of various compounds that were linked to the bioactivities exhibited by B. bulbocastanum tubers. These findings demonstrate the effective antibacterial and antioxidant properties of B. bulbocastanum tubers, indicating their potential use in pharmaceutical and nutraceutical applications.

Objectives: Microbial communities in freshwater are pivotal for driving nutrient transformation, bioremediation, and maintaining the health balance of these ecosystems. However, microbial communities in freshwater ecosystems may undergo rapid shifts in composition in response to environmental changes. In some cases, these shifts may signal ecological imbalance. In the tropics like Malaysia, high humidity coupled with high temperatures and seasonal rainfalls creates an even hotter and highly variable environmental conditions that promote microbial proliferation and increase the risk of introducing potentially pathogenic microorganisms from surrounding anthropogenic sources via surface runoff. The current study offers a comprehensive characterisation of bacterial community composition in Malaysian freshwater drinking reservoirs using high throughput 16 S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. This approach enables bacterial community profiling and supports initial microbial risk assessment in these vital freshwater ecosystems. Data description: State Authorities permitted the collection of water samples from eight freshwater reservoirs within Peninsular Malaysia’s protective zones. The 16 S rRNA gene’s V3-V4 hypervariable region was amplified for next generation sequencing. Raw DNA sequence data in FASTQ format were quality-filtered, adapter-trimmed and processed using a QIIME v1.9.1 based pipeline that integrated standard bioinformatics tools for OTU clustering and taxonomic assignment. Utilising R v3.3.1, statistical analyses and data visualisations were performed on this dataset. Characterising the community structure of bacteria in these important freshwater ecosystems is the first step to working with this dataset.