Chinese Bulletin of Botany ›› 2011, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (3): 276-284.DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1259.2011.00276

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Screening of Universal DNA Barcodes for Malvaceae Plants

Ke Wang1, Keli Chen1*, Zhen Liu1, Shilin Chen2   

  1. 1Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education on Traditional Chinese Medicine Resource and Compound Prescription, HubeiUniversity of Chinese Medicine, Wuhan 430065, China;

    2Institute of Medicinal Plant Development, Peking Union Medical College, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing 100193, China
  • Received:2010-11-05 Revised:2010-12-29 Online:2011-05-01 Published:2011-05-26
  • Contact: Keli Chen

Abstract: To screen the best candidate sequence that can be used as a universal DNA barcode to identify species in Malvaceae, we amplified by PCR and sequenced the DNA fragments of 5 hot regions (ITS, ITS2, rbcL, matK and psbA-trnH) in samples from the family Malvaceae. PCR amplification and sequencing, differential intra- and interspecific divergences, DNA barcoding gap and identification (using BLAST1 and nearest distance methods) were used to evaluate the discrimination ability of these candidate sequences. The ITS region had fairly high amplification efficiency in 26 plant samples belonging to 11 Malvaceae species and better intra- and interspecific divergences and DNA barcoding gap than any other region tested (ITS2, psbA-trnH and rbcL). In addition, the rate of successful identification with the ITS region was 89.9% at the species level for after added 1 228 plant samples from the GenBank database of Malvaceae belonging to 316 species from 60 distinct genera. The psbA-trnH region had the best amplification efficiency and sequencing efficiency; the rate of successful identification with the psbA-trnH region was 63.2%, and the region can discriminate some species that cannot be successfully discriminated by the ITS region. We propose that ITS and psbA-trnH are a promising DNA barcode sequence combination for identification.