All plants in natural ecosystems appear to be symbiotic with fungal endophytes. This highly diverse group of fungi can have profound impacts on plant communities through increasing fitness by conferring abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, increasing biomass and decreasing water consumption, or decreasing fitness by altering resource allocation. Despite more than 100 yr of research resulting in...

Agave tequilana Weber var. 'Azul' is grown for the production of tequila, inulin and syrup. Diverse bacteria inhabit plant tissues and play a crucial role for plant health and growth. In this study culturable endophytic bacteria were extracted from leaf bases of 100 healthy Agave tequilana plants. In plant tissue bacteria occurred at mean population densities of 3 million CFU/g of fresh plant t...

Competitive outcomes among plants can vary in different abiotic and biotic conditions. Here we tested the effects of two phylotypes of Alternaria endophytes on the growth, competitive effects, and competitive responses of the exotic invasive forb Centaurea stoebe. Centaurea stoebe was a better competitor against North American grass species than grasses from its European home range in the absen...

UNLABELLED Endophytic bacteria are harmless in most plant species; and known to boost the growth and development of the host plants probably by secreting growth hormones. The isolation, identification and screening of endophytic bacteria for the plant growth regulators like cytokinin are needed to get the leads for their applications in agriculture sector. We describe the isolation and identifi...

Fungal symbionts that live asymptomatically inside plant tissues (endophytes) can influence plant-insect interactions. Recent work has shown that damage by leaf-cutting ants, a major Neotropical defoliator, is reduced to almost half in plants with high densities of endophytes. We investigated changes in the phenotype of leaves that could influence ants' behavior to result in the reduction of fo...

Bioactive natural products play an important role in the production of several important anticancerous, antifungal and antimicrobial compounds. Due to the limited production of these metabolites in vivo and the increasing need to preserve the biodiversity, microorganisms could be the ultimate source of these novel bioactive products. Endophytes are the microorganism which spends its whole or pa...

The search for new and useful compounds to provide assistance and relief in all aspects of the human condition is ever growing. Drug resistance in bacteria, severe infections caused by various pathogens, the increased human population and environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and pollution of land and water added problems to society. The microbes residing within plant tissues ‘the end...

Fungi are plant-like organisms that lack chlorophyll. An endophytic fungi is a fungal microorganism, which spends the whole or part of its life cycle colonizing inter and /or intra-cellularly inside the healthy tissues of the host plants, typically causing no apparent symptoms of diseases. Endophytes are now considered as an important component of biodiversity. The distribution of endophytic my...

The incorporation of entomopathogenic fungi as biocontrol agents into Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs without doubt, has been highly effective. The ability of these fungal pathogens such as Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium anisopliae to exist as endophytes in plants and protect their colonized host plants against the primary herbivore pests has widely been reported. Aside this sole ...

Endophytes are microorganisms that live inside the plant tissue without causing external symptoms. All plants in nature harbor endophytes. Some endophytes produce and secrete biologically active compounds, known as secondary metabolites, which can help host cope with bacterial, fungal, other pest pathogens. isolated from aquatic algae. Diseases detrimental aquaculture industry where chemical pe...