Detection of endophytic fungi in aspen

Abstract: Endophytes are mutualistic fungi living in green tissue of all plants examined so far.Some of these fungi can produce compounds that are beneficial to the host plant, and it isalso known that some pathogenic fungi live parts of their lives as endophytes. Endophyticinteractions have been well characterized in various grasses, but much is unknown abouttheir interactions with trees. One reason for this is that the fungal biodiversity is muchlarger among endophytes in trees than in grasses, another is that screening for endophytestakes a lot of work. The goal of this thesis work was to develop a polymerase chainreaction (PCR) based method that is simple, fast and reliable for detection of endophytesin aspens. Eleven primer pairs were designed, each pair specific for one fungus. Afteroptimization and evaluation four of the primer pairs were found to be both specific andsensitive, and could detect fungus in DNA preparations from leaf samples.