ISOLATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF ENDOPHYTIC FUNGI THE MEDICINAL PLANT NEOLAMARCKIA CADAMBA

Abstract

Endophytic fungi are widely present in the internal tissues of a plant and provide them numerous benefits. Now day’s medicinal plants are being explored for functional fungal association to analyze health benefits and environmental advantage. Microorganism world is very large. Several varieties of fungus have been explored yet researchers are working on more and new colonies. They live inside the plant, but do not harm or cause the disease to the plant. They even protect plants from the herbivores consumers by secreting secondary metabolites and making it poisonous with some bad taste. Endophytic fungi plays major role in nutrient uptake, heat tolerance, evolution of plants and mainly biodiversity. Endophytic microorganisms contribute in the recovery of plants by following different defense mechanism, including the secretion of plant growth hormones. In today’s world when pharmaceutical industry, agricultural industry and food sector are also focusing on development of substances that already, naturally contain several health benefits.Thus, this study was done to ensure that endophytic fungi present in the medicinal plant are responsible for the characteristics, plant shows.Fungal endophytes show symbiotic relationship with the host plant. Because of its enormous ability to produce bioactive compounds, fugal endophytes draw attention of researchers towards the presence of high value biomolecule and then their isolation, identification with characterization. Current study focused on isolation of endophytic fungi associated with the leaves of medicinal plant i.e. Neolamarckia Cadamba tree and characterize their plant growth promoting properties. Cadamba tree is also known to have some health benefits; its leaves possess wound healing properties. Leaf extract may directly heal the wound and lessen the visibility of scar with pain and inflammation reducing quality. Collection of sample i.e. fresh leaves of Cadamba tree was initial step then to isolate and performed different assays. Various tests were planned to obtained positive results. Observation was quite remarkable. Total of Six (6) fungal colonies were obtained from the leaf of Cadamba tree. Each isolate was examined for growth promoting hormones and their extracellular enzymatic activity. These fungal endophytes have shown variable antimicrobial activity against pathogenic microbe mainly bacteria. They have also observed to produce ammonia and indole acetic acid (IAA) with their enzymatic activities. These parameters are analyzed to check whether these endophytes can help in growth promoting factors for other plant as well. The result showed that endophytic fungi (EP - 6 and EP - 2) had maximum IAA productivity of 190 ± 09.03μg in the presence of 5μg tryptophan. Other fungus i.e. EP-2, EP-3, EP-6 exhibited varying minimal efficiency for solubilizing phosphate salts.