The INDEX OF PARASITIC AND SYMBIOTIC MICROBES ON WILD PLANTS IN JAPAN and its exhibition on the Web

T. Tsukiboshi, S. Yoshida, H. Shinohara and S. Tsushima*¹

¹National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8604 Japan

To grasp the global micro-biodiversity, it is important to construct the inventories of microbes inhabiting our agro-environmental ecosystems. The purpose of this study is to make the index of parasitic, symbiotic and other microorganisms on wild herbaceous plants in Japan.

Although many microorganisms have been reported to occur on wild herbaceous plants in Japan since 1910's, they have never been listed up completely because of the low economic importance of wild plants. So, we collected the literatures including our own data on their occurrence on wild herbaceous plants and published as BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PARASITIC AND SYMBIOTIC MICROBES ON WILD PLANTS IN JAPAN (In Japanese) in 2002. It recorded 1302 species of 312 genera of bacteria and fungi on 1626 species of 95 families of wild herbaceous plants with the scientific name, synonyms, literatures, etc. of each microorganism. Rust, powdery mildew, smut and endophytic fungi were, for example, included in the index.

The constructed database was exhibited on the website of NIAES (URL: http:// cse.niaes.affrc.go.jp/tuki/mokuroku-e.html) as a biodiversity database. It enables the retrieval of the microorganisms inhabiting wild plants in Japan in the two ways: 1, Retrieval from the lists of the scientific names of microorganisms or wild plants; 2, Retrieval by the keywords of the scientific names or English names of microorganisms or wild plants. After retrieving, everyone can see the scientific names, synonyms, English names and literatures of targeted microbes.

For the better understanding of the retrieved microorganisms, the illustrated pages of JAPANESE FUNGI ON PLANTS (Fig.1) was established on the same website. It described the classifications, scientific names with synonyms, occurrence situations in Japan, and color pictures of anamorph and teleomorph of 48 fungal species with their data of the NIAES Herbarium collections since 1890's.

Our database is a regional and restricted one still yet and we will focus on a vast data-system of the microorganism species linked to the molecular and ecological level databases in future.