Plants as well as microbes have always been considered a treasure house of several natural products with a wide range of entities like bio-control agents, catalyst, drugs, enzymes, and immune-suppressants. They are prominent source for the exploration of novel drugs (Bull and Stach 2007). Plants and endophytic fungi have an advantageous symbiotic alliance in which the host plants provide essential nutrients to endophytic fungi and endophytic fungi support host plants by improving resistance and tolerance to various biotic and abiotic stresses (Khare et al. 2018). Endophytic fungi produce wide range of secondary metabolites which are the rich source of potent bioactive metabolites and are also considered as potential antioxidant resource (Huang et al. 2007).
Aquatic hyphomycetes (Ingoldian fungi, amphibious fungi or freshwater hyphomycetes) are a phylogenetically heterogeneous group of micro fungi flourish in well oxygenated water. These fungi are morphologically, physiologically, ecologically, phylogenetically and chemically diverse group of organisms found in freshwater ecosystem as saprobes as well as endophytes. The endophytic nature of these fungi reveals that aquatic hyphomycetous fungi play an important role in plant health by producing various bioactive compounds. For the last few years, these fungi have been studied for their various biological activities, such as antimicrobial, nutrient solubilizer, plant growth promoter etc, but very less studies have demonstrated their antioxidant activity.
Rubus ellipticus Sm., commonly known as the yellow Himalayan raspberry is an evergreen shrub belonging to the Rosaceae family. There are around 600–800 species of Rubus in which, R. ellipticus is the most abundant and wild-growing fruit species on the Indian subcontinent (Badhani et al. 2015). All of the parts of this plant have been used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases as well as this plant has been found to be rich in various secondary metabolites, including flavonoids, polyphenols, terpenoids, tannins, and anthocyanins (Lamichhane et al. 2023).
The present study narrates the isolation of a fungal endophyte, Campylospora parvula, from the healthy roots of R. ellipticus, and to evaluate the antioxidant activity along with chemical profiling by GCMS technique. To the best of our knowledge there was no previous report on the antioxidant activity and chemical characterization of C. parvula Kuzuha.