DNA Barcodes for Accurate Identification of Selected Medicinal Plants (Caryophyllales): Toward Barcoding Flowering Plants of the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

The need for herbal medicinal plants is steadily increasing. Hence, the accurate identification of plant material has become vital for safe usage, avoiding adulteration, and medicinal plant trading. DNA barcoding has shown to be a valuable molecular identification tool for medicinal plants, ensuring the safety and efficacy of plant materials of therapeutic significance. Using morphological characters in genera with closely related species, species delimitation is often difficult. Here, we evaluated the capability of the nuclear barcode ITS2 and plastid DNA barcodes rbcL and matK to identify 20 medicinally important plant species of Caryophyllales. In our analysis, we applied an integrative approach for species discrimination using pairwise distance-based unsupervised operational taxonomic unit “OTU picking” methods, viz., ABGD (Automated Barcode Gap Analysis) and ASAP (Assemble Species by Automatic Partitioning). Along with the unsupervised OTU picking methods, Supervised Machine Learning methods (SML) were also implemented to recognize divergent taxa. Our results indicated that ITS2 was more successful in distinguishing between examined species, implying that it could be used to detect the contamination and adulteration of these medicinally important plants. Moreover, this study suggests that the combination of more than one method could assist in the resolution of morphologically similar or closely related taxa.

A Comparative Study of Diospyros malabarica (Gaub) Extracts in Various Polarity-Dependent Solvents for Evaluation of Phytoconstituents and Biological Activities

“…Recent investigations indicated that the plant-based antioxidants have been known to shield humans from a few prolonged ailments, for example, aggravation, immune system sicknesses, malignancy, and tumor arrangement by preventive the production of free radicals [ 12 ]. The research on plants has been increasing worldwide, and scientific data collected so far reflects the use of medicinal plants in many traditional systems [ 13 ].…”

Molecular Phylogeny, DNA Barcoding, and ITS2 Secondary Structure Predictions in the Medicinally Important Eryngium Genotypes of East Coast Region of India

“…We have estimated the amplicon universality and the success rate of amplification of various chloroplast–plastid (<90%) and nuclear genes (80%) in the rare taxa, Eryngium . Previous reports showed a low amplification rate of 60% in matK for species discrimination in other medicinal plants [ 12 ]. Molecular phylogeny analyzes the genetic heredity based on the DNA sequences to understand the evolutionary interrelationship, deriving the genetic diversity among the species.…”

“…Molecular characterization using random DNA markers showed a compressive genetic variability among the genotypes. However, DNA barcoding is an advanced tool to investigate variations at the most conserved region to specify accurate species delimitation [ 12 ].…”

Advancements and future prospective of DNA barcodes in the herbal drug industry

“…Additional combinations of markers, including rbcL + trnH-psbA, trnH-psbA + ITS2, and matK + trnH-psbA, have also been assessed for their efficiency in discrimination and universality of species identification (Kress et al, 2005;Kress and Erickson, 2007;Li et al, 2012;Tripathi et al, 2013;Mishra et al, 2015;Mahima et al, 2020). Evaluation of the reports related to multiple loci DNA in plant identification revealed that, the combined loci of ITS2 and trnH-psbA were found to be the best two-marker combination for the identification of plants and even herbal samples (Zuo et al, 2011;Vassou et al, 2015;Jamdade et al, 2022). By employing the combined barcode loci a deep phylogenetic tree can be established, which could be applied in the identification of species and also discrimination of closely related species.…”