Fascinating fungal endophytes role and possible beneficial applications: An overview

Abstract

Plants constitute immense and diverse niches for endophytic organisms, and their associations are well reported by many researchers. Certain microorganisms like endophytes prevail in the interior portion of plants, like roots, shoots, leaves, and stems, and do not harm the host plant. Fungi pose symbiotic relationship with plants, showing diversity in enrichment of resources and habitats. Even though these plant microbial interactions were reported from ancient years, an understanding of the mechanisms enabling these microorganisms to interact with host plants is still a dilemma. Unrevealing such unknown interaction pathways and signaling would be a crucial step in biotechnology which would probably lead to the production of different unique and novel compounds. Such compound may have the ultimate role in various applications in future biotechnology. Similarly, the potential of many isolated fungal endophytes has also not been studied well. Hence, an attempt has been made to coordinate the possibilities of usage of isolated endophytes in this chapter. Their uniqueness and specificity were studied with solid-state fermentation and submerged fermentation at a wide range of pH and temperature and few secondary metabolites and industrially important enzymes; its various applications and the common fungi used for such studies have also been discussed in this chapter.