Fungal elicitors enhance ginsenosides biosynthesis, expression of functional genes as well as signal molecules accumulation in adventitious roots of Panax ginseng C. A. Mey

- Treating roots with fungal elicitors efficiently enhanced content of ginsenosides.
- Strong correlation of ginsenosides, signal molecules and key genes was observed.
- Profiles of ginsenosides in P. ginseng roots treated with A. niger were obtained.

In this work, we selected three fungi strains (Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus oryzae) as elicitors prepared from mycelium or fermentation broth to improve ginsenosides production in adventitious roots culture. The results showed that ginsenosides production (29.90 ± 4.67 mg g−1) was significantly enhanced upon elicitation with 200 mg L−1A. niger elicitor prepared from mycelium, which was 3.52-fold of untreated group. HPLC-ESI-MSn analysis was performed, showing that ginsenoside Rb3 was present after treatment with the A. niger. Furthermore, we found that A. niger significantly enhanced accumulation of Nitric oxide (NO), salicylic acid (SA) and jasmonic acid (JA) involved in plant defense response, and significantly up-regulated the expression of the geranyl diphosphate synthase (GPS), farnesyl diphosphate synthase (FPS), squalene synthase (SS), squalene epoxidase (SE), dammarenediol synthase (DS), Two cytochrome P450 (CYP) genes (CYP716A47 and CYP716A53v2) and three UDP-glycosyltransferases (UGT) genes (UGTAE2, UGT94Q2 and UGTpg100).