Isolation and Characterization of Fungal Endophytes Isolated from Medicinal Plant as Plant Growth-Promoting.

Endophytic fungi are widely present in internal plant tissues and provide different benefits to their host. Medicinal plants have unexplored diversity of functional fungal association; therefore, this study aimed to isolate endophytic fungi associated with leaves of medicinal plants and evaluate their plant growth-promoting properties. Fifteen isolated fungal endophytes belonging to Ascomycota, with three different genera, and , were obtained from healthy leaves of . These fungal endophytes have varied antimicrobial activity against human pathogenic microbes and produce ammonia and indole acetic acid (IAA), in addition to their enzymatic activity. The results showed that EP-5 had a maximum IAA productivity of 192.1 ± 4.04 µg mL in the presence of 5 µg mL tryptophan. The fungal isolates of EP-2 EP-3, and EP-14 exhibited variable efficiency for solubilizing phosphate salts. Five representative fungal endophytes of EP-2, EP-5, EP-11, EP-13, and EP-14 and their consortium were selected and applied as bioinoculant to maize plants. The results showed that EP-5 increased root lengths from 15.8 ± 0.8 to 22.1 ± 0.6. Moreover, the vegetative growth features of inoculated maize plants improved more than the uninoculated ones.