Yeh Yu-Hung, Kirschner Roland
School of Forestry and Resource Conservation, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 106319, Taiwan.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 15;15(1):2040. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-86508-8.
In nature conservation, ex situ and in situ conservation strategies are discussed for protecting endangered species of plants and animals. However, the impacts of these strategies on the microbes associated with these species are rarely considered. In our study, we chose the endophytic fungi of the pantropical creeping plant Ipomoea pes-caprae as representative coastal plant in two natural coastal populations and two botanical gardens in Taiwan as collection sites in order to investigate the potential effect of ex situ plantation on the biodiversity of microbes intimately associated with this plant. In a culture-dependent approach, endophytic fungi were isolated under axenic conditions and identified to species, genus, or higher taxonomic ranks with DNA barcodes and morphology. In addition to yielding ca. 800 strains and over 100 morphospecies, a principal component analysis (PCA) of the distribution of the dominant fungal species showed clear differences in the composition of endophytic fungal species depending on the sampling sites. We conclude that the endophytic fungi from the original site are replaced by other species in the ex situ plantations. Due to the limitations of ex situ conservation of microbes and from a mycological and microbial perspective, in situ conservation should outweigh ex situ approaches.
在自然保护中，人们讨论了迁地保护和就地保护策略以保护濒危动植物物种。然而，这些策略对与这些物种相关的微生物的影响却很少被考虑。在我们的研究中，我们选择了泛热带匍匐植物厚藤的内生真菌，以台湾两个自然海岸种群和两个植物园作为采集地点，作为代表性的海岸植物，以研究迁地种植对与这种植物密切相关的微生物生物多样性的潜在影响。采用依赖培养的方法，在无菌条件下分离内生真菌，并通过DNA条形码和形态学将其鉴定到种、属或更高的分类等级。除了获得约800株菌株和100多个形态种外，对优势真菌物种分布的主成分分析（PCA）表明，内生真菌物种的组成因采样地点而异。我们得出结论，迁地种植中来自原始地点的内生真菌被其他物种所取代。由于微生物迁地保护的局限性，从真菌学和微生物学的角度来看，就地保护应优于迁地保护方法。
