Planta Med 2008; 74 - PK8
DOI: 10.1055/s-0028-1084977

An assessment of nrITS sequence for use in barcoding traditional Chinese medicinal herbs

H Guo 1, 2, S Zhang 2, N Yang 2, R Yang 2, Q Sun 1, J Yu 2
  • 1School of Traditional Chinese Materia Medica, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang 110016, China
  • 2Key Laboratory of Genome Sciences and Information, Beijing Institute of Genomics, CAS, Beijing 101300, China

DNA barcoding has been applied to systematic and phylogenetic studies on animals [1] and limited numbers of plant taxa [2,3]. In this study, we attempted to use the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (nrITS) as a barcoding marker candidate for classification of traditional Chinese medicinal herbs (TCM) which are lacking of adequate methods for morphological and chemical identification.

The ITS region of DNA extracted from 49 TCM samples was successfully amplified by PCR with primers T3F (5'-GATCAATGCAGACCCATGAAT-3') and T3R (5'-TGATGTGCCTACAACTTGGAG-3'), and then the PCR products were directly sequenced with primer pairs T3F/T3R and 5.8S1/5.8S2 (5'-GCAACTTGCGTTCAAAGACTC-3', 5'-GATGAAGAACGTAGCGAAATG-3'). 152 polymorphic loci have been obtained by Clustal alignment of the 49 unique sequences. Also, we observed average K2P (Kimura two parameter) distances of 0.15 and 0.067 within genus and species. This result suggested that nrITS sequence can be a universal DNA barcode for use in barcoding TCM herbs.

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2. Ward, R.D. et al., (2005) Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 360: 1847–57.

3. Kress, W.J. et al., (2005) Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 102: 8369–74.