Application of DNA Barcoding to the Medicinal Plants of the Araceae Family

The medicinal plants of the Araceae family are distributed widely throughout China and more than half of them are medicinal plants, whereas materials of similar morphology and chemical fingerprints are often misidentified. DNA barcoding is a new technique that uses DNA sequences from a small fragment of the genome to identify species. Five specific DNA regions (matK, rpoB, rpoC1[1], rbcL, psbA-trnH[2]) of 95 samples of 34 genus were amplified and sequenced. We found that the psbA-trnH is difficult to sequence through PCR product, because this region is A, T rich (70%, averaged). The amplification efficiency of rbcL, matK, rpoB and rpoC1 were 87.4%, 94.7%, 98.9%, 100%, respectively. However the matK was variable enough to identify species, and the intra-specific divergence from 0 to 0.20% was significantly less than the inter-specific divergence from 0.42% to 19.4%. The results indicate that the psbA-trnH is not suitable to identify the medicinal plants of the Araceae family. The matK can be used as a barcoding to identify all species of Araceae. Acknowledgements: This work is supported by the International Cooperation Program of Science and Technology (No. 2007DFA30990) and the Special Founding for Healthy Field (No. 200802043) References: [1] Chase MW, et al. (2007) A proposal for a standardized protocol to barcode all land plants 56(2): 295–299. [2] Kress WJ, et al. (2005) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102: 8369–8374.