An endophyte of the tropical forage grass Brachiaria brizantha: isolating, identifying, and characterizing the fungus, and determining its antimycotic properties.

Brachiaria, predominantly an African genus, contains species, such as B. brizantha, an apomictic C4 grass, that are commercially important forage grasses in tropical America, where they now cover about 55 million hectares. From B. brizantha accession CIAT 6780, we isolated an endophytic fungus that may be economically significant. The fungus was identified as Acremonium implicatum (J. Gilman & E.V. Abott). 18S rDNA and ITS rDNA sequences were used to characterize isolates of the endophyte, and showed that they belonged to the Acremonium genus, being close to A. strictum and A. kiliense. Using the random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) technique, involving arbitrary primers of 10 bases, we showed that the isolates were highly similar to each other. Antiserum produced from a monoconidial culture of A. implicatum isolated from B. brizantha 6780, differentiated the isolates consistently in line with the DNA data. When we compared endophyte-free with endophyte-infected B. brizantha CIAT 6780 plants, both artificially inoculated with the pathogenic Drechslera fungus, we found that the endophyte-infected plants had fewer and smaller lesions than did the endophyte-free plants. Sporulation of Drechslera sp. on artificially inoculated leaf sheath tissues was also much less on tissue infected with the endophyte.