“…Another opportunistic endophyte, B. kochii reported in the present work was first isolated from dairy and pharmaceutical production sites (Seiler et al, 2012) and later reported from soil (Liu et al, 2020), compost pit, coral reef, insect gut (Wan et al, 2017), fermented fish (Alvionita et al, 2020) and sparingly found as endophytes in tomato seed (Someya et al, 2021), papaya (Thomas et al, 2019) and noni (Liu et al, 2015b). Bacillus solani , designated as passenger endophyte of the present study, was previously reported as potato rhizosphere colonizing antagonistic bacteria (Liu et al, 2015a). Another passenger endophyte, Micrococcus luteus , was also found in diverse ecological niches like human skin (Kloos & Musselwhite, 1975), soil (Sims et al, 1986), indoor air samples (Kutmutia et al, 2019) and was occasionally reported as an endophyte of jute (Haidar et al, 2018) and sorghum root (Gamalero et al, 2020).…”