Endophytic Fungal Diversity of Aerides crispa, an Epiphytic Orchid

Aerides crispa is an epiphytic plant that belongs to Orchidaceae family. Re-quirement of special habitat makes epiphytic orchids different from other plants. Day by day favourable conditions for these plants are decreasing. Here we have isolated six endophytic fungi from a single orchid. Isolated fungal cultures were molecularly characterized using ITS sequence region comparison with known fungi from NCBI data base and submitted to Gen-Bank. Homology of the fungi were confirmed by similarity matrix generation and phylogenetic tree construction. Thus, the endophytic fungi obtained were Cladosprium cladosporioides, Nigrospora sphaerica, Colletotricum gloe-osporioides, Fusarium circinatum, F.equiseti, Cl.cladosporioides. From the research study, it is revealed that genotypic characterization is a better method for identification of fungi than traditional methods, since same fungi were identified from different parts and also different species from same part of the same plant shows the interesting part of biodiversity. Richness of fungi in A crispaspeaks a lot about the importance of conservation of or-chids, endophytes and thereby biodiversity. The study describes endophytic fungi from an epiphytic orchid Acrispa to its sequence level identification.