Application of bioinformatics in molecular authentication of traditional Chinese medicinal materials

Abstract

Benefiting from various DNA technologies, DNA markers have now become a popular means for the identification of Chinese medicinal materials. Facing the huge amount of valuable data that has been produced, researchers need to understand the bioinformatics tools for analyzing the obtained DNA information. This paper summarizes the applications of bioinformatics in molecular authentication of Chinese medicinal materials, including checking phylogenetic information of the samples, searching and retrieving DNA sequence data, matching of similarity between the sequences and performing multiple sequence alignment.