XVI International Botanical Congess

Some endophytic fungi are prolific producers of secondary metabolites. Selection of these fungi for natural products screening is an arbitrary process because a portion of fungi that can be recovered from a plant defies conventional identification. Only the vegetative state of many strains is observed in culture. To better recognize metabolically productive strains, we attempted to classify nonsporulating fungi from large cranberry by a rDNA sequence approach. SSU and ITS sequences were obtained from a subset of isolates. These sequences were compared to those of known fungi by neighbor joining and parsimony analysis to infer phenetic and phylogenetic relationships. Many strains can be associated with major clades within the ascomycetes but identification to family and genus remained database limited.