Isolation and Characterization of Endophytes from Different Plants: Effects on Growth of Pennisetum typhoides

Poonam Gupta¹, Monika Asthana¹, Avnish Kumar¹, Bhanwar Puniya², Siddhartha Barun^3*

¹Department of Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Khandari Campus, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Agra - 282 004, India. ²G.N. Ramachandran Knowledge Center, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi ³Gujarat State Biotechnology Mission, Leogene Project, Gandhinagar - 382 017, India.

ABSTRACT: Studying symbiotic association can provide principles to improve crop yield under harsh conditions. In present study, influence of endophytes was studied on seedling emergence and growth of plumule and radicle of Pennisetum typhoides. The plants were sterilized on surface to prevent contaminations and then macerated in disinfected pestle and mortar to obtain pure colonies of in-habitat bacterial colonies on King's B media, Nutrient agar and Potato dextrose agar using conventional methods. From 08 plant species, 319 endophytic bacterial cultures were isolated. The isolated endophytes were applied on seeds of Pennisetum typhoides to check the influence on seedling emergence, and growth of radicle and plumule. Out of the 319 cultures, 224 (70.22%) cultures were inhibiting seed germination and growth, while 95 (29.8%) cultures were promoting growth of shoot and/or root of Pennisetum typhoides. Of these 95 growth promoting cultures, 49 (51.6 %) cultures were promoting growth of both shoot and root; 42 (44.2 %) were promoting shoot but inhibiting root growth and 4 (4.21%) were promoting root, but inhibiting shoot growth. Plant species Catharanthus roseus had maximum percentage of inhabitant cultures (58%) that promoted growth of shoot and root. Microbiological characterization of growth promotory cultures revealed that major number of bacteria belongs to Gram positive bacillus (21 cultures) group followed by Gram negative bacillus (16 cultures) group. The mechanism of growth promotion was observed as nitrogen fixation alone (38 cultures), phosphate solubilization along with nitrogen fixation (4 cultures) and other methods (7 cultures). The isolated endophytic strains have the potential to be used as seed inoculants or co-inoculants for improvement in growth, development and yields and thus help in sustainable development in the field of agriculture.

KEYWORDS: Endophytes; growth promotory; seed inoculant; Nitrogen fixation; phosphate solubilization

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