Taxonomic study on the grapevine endophytic fungi in west Azerbaijan

Endophytic fungi are microorganisms that colonize healthy plant tissues inter-and/or intra-cellulary,persisting for the whole or part of its life cycle without causing disease symptoms in the host plant. In spite of their major impact in plant population and communities, they are among the poorly understands group of fungi and there is little know about their abundance, habitat, host preference, ecological impact and biodiversity. Also hope of finding unique secondary metabolites and enzymes that affect plants, herbivores, microbes make their application possible in medicine, agriculture and industry adds to they role and important, so in this study and in order to identification of the endophytic fungi of grapevine, during summer and autumn seasons in 2011, samples from healthy shoots and leaves were collected from the Urmia and Sardasht regions in west Azerbaijan province. Firstly, plant part washed with running tap water for about 15 min before surface treatments. Afterwards, plant parts were washed 4-5 times with sterile distilled water, then surface sterilized for 1 minute in 70% ethanol followed by 15 minutes in 3% sodium hypochlorite, and finally were washed 4-5 times with sterile distilled water. Sterilized plant materials were cut into small pieces and transferred on PDA medium supplemented with streptomycin sulphate. Plates were incubated under constant darkness at 25°C for 1-2 months. Fungi growing were purified with using hyphal tip and single spore methods. Fungal isolates were identified in standard conditions and based on morphological data and sequence data of ITS-rDNA. In this paper viz. Alternaria brassicicola, A. chlamydospora, Aspergillus niger, Emericella nidulans, Beauveria bassiana, Bipolaris spicifera, Epicoccum nigrum, Mucor plumbeus, Phoma glomerata, Rhizoctonia solani, Trichothecium roseum, Truncatella angustata and Ulocladium atrum are introduced. Alternaria species had frequently isolated among the mentioned species. This is the first study on the identification of endophytic fungi from grapevine trees in Iran.