Abstract
Herbal products play an important role globally in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. However, some specific groups of herbal products are easily adulterated by confused materials on the market, which seriously reduces the products’ quality. Universal conventional DNA barcodes would function poorly since the processed herbal products generally suffer from varying degrees of DNA degradation and DNA mixing during processing or manufacturing. For quality control purposes, an accurate and effective method should be provided for species identification of these herbal products. Here, we provided a strategy of developing the specific mini-barcode using Senna as an example, and by coupling with the metabarcoding technique, it realized the qualitative and quantitative identification of processed herbal products. The plastomes of Senna obtusifolia (L.) H.S.Irwin & Barneby and Senna occidentalis (L.) Link were newly assembled, and the hypervariable coding-regions were identified by comparing their genomes. Then, the specific mini-barcodes were developed based on the identified hypervariable regions. Finally, we applied the DNA metabarcoding technique to the developed mini-barcodes. Results showed that the lengths of plastomes of S. obtusifolia and S. occidentalis were 162,426 and 159,993 bp, respectively. Four hypervariable coding-regions ycf1, rpl23, petL, and matK were identified. Two specific mini-barcodes were successfully developed from matK, and the mini-barcode of primer 647F-847R was proved to be able to qualitatively and quantitatively identify these two processed Senna seeds. Overall, our study established a valuable way to develop the specific mini-barcode, which may provide a new idea for the quality control of processed herbal products.
Highlights
Herbal products use medicinal plants as raw materials for herbal medicines, herbal extracts and dietary supplements
Either of the two plastomes displayed a typical quadripartite structure consisting of a pair of IR regions
The two Senna plastomes encoded an identical set of 129 predicted functional genes, 111 of which were unique, and 18 were duplicated in the IR regions
Summary
Herbal products use medicinal plants as raw materials for herbal medicines, herbal extracts and dietary supplements. The authentication of herbal products has become an important topic within and beyond the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. DNA barcoding is a technique for authenticating species using a standard DNA region, aiming to provide rapid, automatable, and cost-effective methods for accurate identification at the species-level. Used as an identification tool, DNA barcoding is applied in the industrial quality assurance context to identify herbal products (Mosa et al, 2018; Amritha et al, 2020). Once the plants undergo a series of extraction and processing steps resulting in DNA mixing, DNA barcoding would not be a suitable choice. Herbal products generally suffer from varying degrees of DNA mixing during processing or manufacturing. For a suitable solution to this case, DNA metabarcoding appeared to be an alternative choice
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