Endophytic fungi associated with the Antarctic grass Deschampsia antarctica Desv. (Poaceae)

By L. Rosa, Aline B. M. Vaz, R. Caligiorne, S. Campolina, C. Rosa. Polar Biology, 2009

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Deschampsia antarctica Desv. (Poaceae) represents one of the two vascular plants that have colonized the Antarctic continent, which is usually exposed to extreme environmental conditions. In this work, we have characterized the endophytic fungi associated with the leaves of D. antarctica. Endophytic fungi were recovered from 91 individual plants from different points of Admiralty Bay at King George Island, Antarctica. A total of 26 fungal isolates were obtained from 273 leaf fragments. All isolates were identified by analysis of the sequences of the internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) of the rDNA. Alternaria and Phaeosphaeria were the most frequent genera associated with the plant. Other fungal isolates were identified as Entrophospora sp. and several undescribed Ascomycete species. An interesting result was obtained for the isolates UFMGCB 215 and UFMGCB 262, which were related to fungi associated with bryophytes present in boreal ecosystems. Some isolates showed low identity in the ITS sequences to sequences of fungal species deposited in GenBank, suggesting that these fungi could be new species. This work is the first report on fungal endophytes associated with leaves of the Antarctic grass D. antarctica.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a740e7ef74c5f83b7e085314365f73a118301dec

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In Cell Biology

1. M. Márquez
2. L. D. Acuña
3. G. Bills
4. I. Zabalgogeazcoa
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In Molecular Biology

1. G. Bills
2. I. Zabalgogeazcoa

Citations in the corpus

• Endophytic mycobiota of leaves and roots of the grass Holcus lanatus (2010, background): “For example, incidences of endophyte infection approaching 100% have been observed in the tropics, but in plants from polar habitats the incidence is much lower (Arnold and Lutzoni 2007; Rosa et al. 2009).”
• Fungal community associated with marine macroalgae from Antarctica (2010, unknown): “Recent studies have showed that some fungal species can be found in Antarctica, Boreal, Arctic, or high latitudes regions (Bridge and Newsham 2009; Rosa et al. 2009; Uspon et al. 2009).”