One of the most important plant-fungal symbiotic relationships is that of cool season grasses with endophytic fungi of the genera Epichloë and Neotyphodium. These associations often confer benefits, such as resistance to herbivores and improved drought tolerance, to the hosts. One benefit that appears to be unique to fine fescue grasses is disease resistance. As a first step towards understandi...

The effects of soil drenches with systemic fungicides on viability of clavicipitaceous anamorphic endophytes, non-choke inducing endosymbiotic fungi of the genus Neotyphodium that systemically infect grasses, were tested in endophyte-infected seedlings of Hordeum brevisubulatum subsp. violaceum, Lolium perenne and Festuca arundinacea germplasm. None of the endophytes of these grasses were sensi...

Many plants support symbiotic microbes, such as endophytic fungi, that can alter interactions with herbivores. Most endophyte research has focused on agronomically important species, with less known about the ecological roles of native endophytes in native plants. In particular, whether genetic variation among endophyte symbionts affects herbivores of plant hosts remains unresolved for most nat...

A comparison of published estimates of mycorrhizal and dark septate endophyte (DSE) colonisation from various ecosystems suggests that DSE may be as abundant as mycorrhizal fungi as judged by the proportion of host plants colonised in mixed plant communities, or by the extent of colonisation in sampled root systems. While many strides have been made in understanding the ecological significance ...

Plant endophytic fungi are an important and novel resource of natural bioactive compounds with their potential applications in agriculture, medicine and food industry. In the past two decades, many valuable bioactive compounds with antimicrobial, insecticidal, cytotoxic and anticancer activities have been successfully discovered from the endophytic fungi. During the long period of co-evolution,...

Climate change is accelerating the spread of plants and their associated species to new ranges. The differences in range shift capacity of the various types of species may disrupt long-term co-evolved relationships especially those belowground, however, this may be less so for seed-borne endophytic microbes. We collected seeds and soil of the range-expanding Centaurea stoebe and the congeneric ...

The purpose of this note is to communicate the diversity of endophytic fungi isolated from living leaves of Halodule wrightii and Thalassia testudinum, two ubiqui­ tous seagrasses in the north­central Gulf of Mexico. Fungi were isolated from surface­sterilized leaf fragments of the two plants that had been inoculated onto seawater malt extract agar. Leaves of T. testudinum harbored slightly mor...

Fungal endophytes represent one of the most ubiquitous plant symbionts on Earth and are phylogenetically diverse. The structure and diversity of endophyte communities have been shown to depend on host taxa and climate, but there have been relatively few studies exploring endophyte communities throughout host maturity. We compared foliar fungal endophyte communities between seedlings and adult t...

Tall fescue and meadow fescue are naturally infected with fungal endophytes, Neotyphodiumcoenophialum and Neotyphodium uncinatum, respectively. Seed traits are an important measureof the effects of the endophytic fungi which has been less addressed. In this study we usedendophyte-infected (EI) and endophyte-free (EF) clones of tall and meadow fescue genotypes inthe field to investigate the effe...