International Journal of Molecular Sciences Article Diversity and Antimicrobial Activity of Endophytic Fungi Isolated from Chloranthus japonicus Sieb in Qinling Mountains, China Chao An 1,2, Saijian Ma 1,2, Xinwei Shi 2,3, Wenjiao Xue 1,2,*, Chen Liu 1,2 and Hao Ding 1,2 1 Shaanxi Institute of Microbiology, Xi’an 710043, China;
[email protected] (C.A.);
[email protected] (S.M.);
[email protected] (C.L.);
[email protected] (H.D.) 2 Engineering Center of QinLing Mountains Natural Products, Shaanxi Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710043, China;
[email protected] 3 Xi’an Botanical Garden of Shaanxi Province (Institute of Botany of Shaanxi Province), Xi’an 710061, China * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 8 July 2020; Accepted: 17 August 2020; Published: 19 August 2020 Abstract: The plant Chloranthus japonicus Sieb is known for its anticancer properties and mainly distributed in China, Japan, and Korea. In this study, we firstly investigated the diversity and antimicrobial activity of the culturable endophytic fungi from C. japonicus. A total of 332 fungal colonies were successfully isolated from 555 tissue segments of the medicinal plant C. japonicus collected from Qinling Mountains, China. One hundred and thirty representative morphotype strains were identified according to ITS rDNA sequence analyses and were grouped into three phyla (Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Mucoromycota), five classes (Dothideomycetes, Sordariomycetes, Eurotiomycetes, Agaricomycetes, Mucoromycetes), and at least 30 genera. Colletotrichum (RA, 60.54%) was the most abundant genus, followed by Aspergillus (RA, 11.75%) and Diaporthe (RA, 9.34%). The Species Richness Index (S, 56) and the Shannon-Wiener Index (H0, 2.7076) indicated that C.