Abstract
The community of endophytic fungi associated with Acer ginnala, a common tree in northeastern China, was investigated. Four media, PDA, Czapek’s, WA and Sabouraud’s, were used to inoculate explants from seeds, annual twigs and perennial twigs (xylem and bark). Media strongly affected the isolated species number, but not colonization frequency (CF) or isolation frequency (IF). To investigate media effect further, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was done. As a result, two components accounted for 86.502% of the total variance were extracted. These two components were named as PDA-determined factor (accounted for 45.139% of the total variance) and Czapek’s-determined factor (accounted for 41.363% of the total variance), respectively. This result suggested that only two media, PDA and Czapek’s, could be used instead of all four media in this study without affecting the isolation results significantly. In total, ten taxa were isolated in this study. Alternaria sp., Phomopsis sp., Neurospora sp. and Phoma sp. were dominant endophytes while Pleosporales Incertae Sedis sp., Cladosporium sp., Trichoderma sp. and Epicoccum sp. were rare taxa. Different tissues/organs had different endophyte assemblages. All tissue/organ pairs had low Bray-Curtis indices (<0.3) except for bark and annual twigs (0.63). Compared to perennial twigs, annual twigs had a lower taxon number, lower isolate number, lower endophyte dominance and diversity indices. Seeds had distinct assemblage, lower similarity and similar low diversity indices to annual twigs. These results suggested that tissue type determines the endophyte assemblage while age determines the diversity.
Highlights
Endophytic fungi, the symbionts that reside in the above ground tissues of plants, have been considered as a source of novel biologically active secondary metabolites [1]
Cultivation-independent screening methods like direct PCR from plant tissue are used by an increasing number of researchers for diversity study [7], the cultivation-dependent isolating method is still important in the study of fungal endophytes, especially in isolation of bioactive compounds from endophytes [10,11,12,13,14]
If the number of media increased, the isolation work is increased exponentially. Is it possible to reduce the media number without significant sacrifice of isolation results? In a previous study, we identified some endophytic fungi rich in gallic acid from Acer ginnala Maxim., a tree mainly distributed in China and Korea [15]
Summary
Endophytic fungi, the symbionts that reside in the above ground tissues of plants, have been considered as a source of novel biologically active secondary metabolites [1]. These bioactive compounds include paclitaxel, podophyllotoxin, camptothecine, vinblastine, hypericin, and diosgenin, etc. Cultivation-independent screening methods like direct PCR from plant tissue are used by an increasing number of researchers for diversity study [7], the cultivation-dependent isolating method is still important in the study of fungal endophytes, especially in isolation of bioactive compounds from endophytes [10,11,12,13,14]. In the present study we report on the diversity of endophytic fungi from the seeds and twigs of A. ginnala, comparing the effect of cultivation medium changes
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