Endophytic Fungi Isolated from Ageratina adenophora Exhibits Potential Antimicrobial Activity against Multidrug-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Multidrug-resistant bacteria such as (MRSA) cause infections that are difficult to treat globally, even with current available antibiotics. Therefore, there is an urgent need to search for novel antibiotics to tackle this problem. Endophytes are a potential source of novel bioactive compounds; however, the harnessing of novel pharmacological compounds from endophytes is infinite. Therefore, this study was designed to identify endophytic fungi (from ) with antibacterial activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria. Using fungal morphology and ITS-rDNA, endophytic fungi with antibacterial activities were isolated from . The results of the ITS rDNA sequence analysis showed that a total of 124 morphotype strains were identified. In addition, Species richness ( , 52), Margalef index ( , 7.3337), Shannon-Wiener index ( ,3.6745), and Simpson's diversity index ( , 0.9304) showed that have abundant endophytic fungi resources. Furthermore, the results of the agar well diffusion showed that the , , and endophytic fungi's ethyl acetate extracts showed moderate antibacterial and bactericidal activities, against methicillin-resistant (MRSA) SMU3194, with a MIC of 0.5-1 mg/mL and a MBC of 1-2 mg/mL. In summary, contains endophytic fungi resources that can be pharmacologically utilized, especially as antibacterial drugs.