Abstract
Plants are valuable source of a medicine and have long being used to cure various ailments. However, the efficacy of drugs derived from plant depends on the reliable identification of correct plants. To avoids the usage of incorrect plant that can cause poisoning, a reliable method than morphological characteristic is required. DNA barcoding technique have shown to be an efficient tool for species identification by using a short fragment of the genomic DNA and has been used widely in molecular plant taxonomy for authentication of medicinal plants species. Thus, the goal of this study was to use DNA barcoding technique to discriminate medicinal plants. DNA samples were extracted from twenty medicinal plants, chosen based on their therapeutic efficacy and were used as templates. Internal transcribed spacer (ITS2) gene was selected to be the best molecular marker for identification purposes. The efficiency of the amplification by polymerase chain reaction was sending for sequencing and species identification was performed using MEGA6. Our findings show that DNA barcoding is an efficient tool for plants identification. This study revealed that medicinal plant and their closely related species can be distinguished by using DNA barcoding technique with ITS2 region as it is an efficient marker and potential DNA marker for authentication of selected plants.
Highlights
Plants have been used as source of medicine for thousands of years by many cultures and there are many publications [1, 6, 9, 10] that highlighted the usage of plants to treat various kinds of diseases
The primers used were internal transcribed spacers 2 (ITS2)-F, 5’-GCGATACTTGGTGTGAAT-3’ and ITS2-R, 5’-GACGCTTCTCCAGACTACAAT-3’ .The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) product were run on a 2% agarose gel in 0.5 x TBE buffer and DNA sequencing was performed by Bioneer Corporation located at Korea using the same amplification primers
The technique is a useful tool for taxonomist because rapid and accurate method of species identification is very much important to ensure that the drugs made from medicinal herbs are safe to consume
Summary
Plants have been used as source of medicine for thousands of years by many cultures and there are many publications [1, 6, 9, 10] that highlighted the usage of plants to treat various kinds of diseases. Traditional herbal medicines have gained popularity as consumers are reportedly more comfortable taking product that are deemed natural, available, cheap and are less side effects. The traditional approach towards discovery of plant based drugs often involved amount of time and expenditure. Traditional approaches for identification of herbal products include organoleptic methods (identification by sense: taste, sight, smell, touch), macroscopic and microscopic methods (identification by shape, colour, texture) [13]. If the specimen is damaged or immature stage of development, even specialist may be unable to identify. Another identification method is by using chemical profiling but it may be affected by physiological and storage conditions. There is a need for new approach in an efficient and accurate identification of plant species and their adulterants.
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