Endophytic fungi of wild zingiberaceae from Mount Halimun Salak National Park

Abstract

The genus Colletotrichum, Diaporthe and Guignardia can live as plant pathogens on a wide variety of tropical woody, herbaceous and graminicoulos plants as well as fungal endophytes of many healthy plants. These two life styles are apparently caused by their biotrophic life strategies as such that they live as symptomless endophytes of living plant tissues. The species in Colletotrichum, Diaporthe and Guignardia have been reported to cause serious diseases in various economic plants in Indonesia. The exploration of these fungal endophytes was mainly done on economic plants. Those from non-cultivated plants in natural habitats are much less studied, with most studies being of endophytic strains. No reports are found on fungal endophyte from wild Zingiberaceae plant, therefore it is necessary to conduct research on the endophytic fungi on Zingiberaceae in order to provide information related fungal endophyte of wild Zingiberaceae in Indonesia. All fungal species recorded from Indonesia were mostly identified based on morphological characters. In this research, isolates of the fungal endophyte was collected by conventional isolation method. The isolates were then identified molecularly based on their ITS1F-ITS4 sequence. These sequences were aligned with MAFFT online. Phylogenetic analyses with all reference strains were performed using MEGA5 to produce the phylogram. The position and bootstrap value for branch support became the criteria of naming the isolates. Eleven isolates of fungal endophytes were obtained from different part of four species of Zingiberaceae at Mount Halimun Salak National Park (MHSNP) namely Alpinia malaccensis, Ammomum gracile, Etlingera punicea and Zingiber odoriferum. These consisted of nine isolates of Colletotrichum spp., one each isolate of Diaporthe infecunda and Guignardia mangiferae. Three of Colletotrichum isolates were belong to gloeosporioides clade, and six others were separate and made its own clade. The Colletotrichum species distributed widely on those four plant species at different plant part, one isolate of Colletotrichum kahawae subsp. kahawae from root of Etlingera punicea, one isolate of Colletotrichum aff. siamense from root of Alpinia malaccensis, and seven isolates of unidentified Colletotrichum species either from root of Alpinia malaccensis, pseudostem and leaf of Ammomum gracile, and from root of Zingiber odoriferum. One isolate of Diaporthe infecunda was from pseudostem of Alpinia malaccensis and one isolate Guignardia mangiferae was from pseudostem of Zingiber odoriferum. All of this finding is new records on fungal endophytes from wild species of Zingiberaceae and may contribute to the management of domestication of these plants.