Community of Endophytic Fungi from Alpine Conifers on Mt. Seorak

Endophytic fungi occupy various ecological niches, which reinforces their diversity. As few studies have investigated the endophytic fungi of alpine conifers, we focused on four species of alpine conifers in this study—Abies nephrolepis, Pinus pumila, Taxus cuspidata var. nana, and Thuja koraiensis—and examined them for endophytic fungi. A total of 108 endophytic fungi were isolated. There were four taxa in A. nephrolepis, 12 in P. pumila, 18 in T. cuspidata var. nana, and 17 in T. koraiensis; these were divided into five classes: Agaricomycetes (3.2%), Dothideomycetes (29.0%), Leotiomycetes (15.0%), Sordariomycetes (41.9%), and Orbiliomycetes (1.6%). The most prevalent fungi were Sydowia polyspora (22.7%) and Xylariaceae sp. (22.7%) in P. pumila, Phomopsis juglandina (16.1%) in T. cuspidata var. nana, and Thuja-endophytes sp. 1 (70.0%) in T. koraiensis. However, there was no dominant species growing in A. nephrolepis. Some host plants were analyzed using next-generation sequencing. We obtained 4618 reads for A. nephrolepis and 2268 reads for T. koraiensis. At the genus level, the top three endophytic fungi were Ophiostomataceae_uc (64.6%), Nectriaceae_uc (15.5%), and unclassified organism (18.0%) in A. nephrolepis and Nectriaceae_uc (41.9%), Ophiostomataceae_uc (41.8%), and Magnaporthaceae_uc (9.2%) in T. koraiensis. Our results show that there are different communities of endophytic fungi among different host plants, even if the host plants are in the same region. Such ecological niches are important in terms of the ecological restoration of alpine conifers.