Diversity of Weed Endophytic Fungi

The use of herbicides to control weeds is very common but some of them are human unhealthy, environmentally detrimental and they stimulate herbicide resistance. Therefore, using microorganisms as natural herbicides appears as a promising alternative. Thus, the endophytic mycoflora of different species of symptomatic and asymptomatic weeds were compared to characterize the fungal component associated with symptoms and likely to harbor mycoherbicidal candidates. A collection of 475 symptomatic and asymptomatic plants belonging to 23 weed species was established. A metabarcoding approach based on amplification of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region combined with high-throughput Illumina sequencing revealed the diversity of the community of endophytic fungi hosted by these plants.