The fungal endobiome of seaweeds of the Andaman Islands, India

Seventeen seaweed species (two green algae, nine brown algae and six red algae) of the Andaman Islands, India, were studied for their culturable fungal endophyte as-semblage. A total of 796 endophytic isolates (67 species of fungi belonging to 22 genera and 10 sterile forms) were recovered from the 17 seaweeds. All the fungi were marine-derived forms and many belonged to Eurotio-mycetes and Sordariomycetes of the Ascomycota group. More species of Aspergillus, Fusarium, Penicillium and Trichoderma were present as endophytes. While most endophytic species recovered were present in low fre-quency, some fungi like Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus sp. 1, Nodulisporium sp., Pestalotiopsis sp., Trichoderma yunnanense and Xylaria sp. 1 exhibited more than 40% frequency of colonization. Apart from yielding the maxi-mum number of endophytic isolates, different Tricho-derma species showed the highest colonization frequency in 11 of the 17 seaweeds. The results of this study indi-cate that fungi belonging to Eurotiomycetes which occur in low frequency as endophytes in terrestrial plants represent a significant percentage in the seaweeds and that the environment might have a more critical role than host specificity in determining the endophyte commu-nity of seaweed mycobiome.