Correction: Krauss, J., et al. Epichloë Endophyte Infection Rates and Alkaloid Content in Commercially Available Grass Seed Mixtures in Europe. Microorganisms 2020, 8, 498

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper [1]:

After the publication of the manuscript, the authors recognized that there is a discrepancy in Table 1 in five seed mixture compositions (S_10, S_13, S_17, S_29 and S_33), due to differences between the information in catalogs and the actual product labels. The authors changed the seed compositions and suppliers, where necessary, to match with product labels on the seed mixture packages. We also deleted two sentences from the discussion regarding speculations on possible infections of the seed variety NEW ORLEANS, which was not a component in any of the tested seed mixtures.

We changed Table 1 and present the correct varieties here.

These inconsistencies occurred as the information on seed varieties were wrongly taken from catalogs instead of package labels. We want to point out that contaminations with Epichloë infected seeds could have occurred at different production steps of the seed mixtures (breeders, producer of seed cultivars, producer of the seed mixture, trader, shop/market, etc.). Therefore, our study cannot be used to detect the source of the Epichloë contaminations of the seed varieties.

The authors want to point out that seed mixture S_33 did not contain the perennial ryegrass variety NEW ORLEANS, which was therefore not tested. Speculations on possible infections of the variety NEW ORLEANS in the discussion are not valid and we apologize for this unjustified speculation.

Therefore the authors would like to delete these sentences from the discussion: “The turfgrass seed mixture S_33 contains 5% of the perennial ryegrass variety NEW ORLEANS, which is listed as a top American breeding variety and could be the source of Epichloë infected seeds. The low percentage of this variety in the seed mixture could result in sampling variation, which may explain why 8.7% of E+ seeds were detected, and why the alkaloid quantification results differed between the two laboratories.”

Following a reviewer’s comment, we meanwhile grew plants from the four grass seed mixtures (S_10, S_24, S_32 and S_33) which were Epichloë infected and contained alkaloids, and tested 8- and 20-week old seeded plants for Epichloë alkaloids. We used 30 randomly picked seeds per seed mixture and tested eight grass samples containing about ten randomly picked grass tillers per seed mixture. In S_10 and S_33 we detected peramine and lolitrem B. In S_32, we detected peramine, lolitrem B and in addition ergovaline. In S_24, we could not detect alkaloids in the plants. As we only picked 30 random seeds, it could be possible that no infected seeds were grown from S_24. As three of the four endophyte and alkaloid positive seed mixtures produced alkaloids in the grown plants, we confirm our result that infected seed mixtures can introduce vertebrate toxic alkaloids into the agricultural environment.

The authors would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused to the readers by these changes.