Abstract
Paeonia is a phylogenetically and taxonomically complex group. In this study, two chloroplast coding region of the matK and rbcL genes, two intergenic spacers, 5’ trnK-matKand matK-3’ trnK, the ribosomal RNA 18S and 5S genes, and the nuclear ribosomal DNA ITS gene were sequenced to study phylogenetic relationships of four Paeonia species. In the matK coding region, most nucleotide variations pointed at the divergence betweenPaeonia suffruticosa (MO) and other three species, strongly supporting the phylogenetic evolution of section Paeonia and section Moutan in the Paeonia genus; the variable sites ofPaeonia lactiflora CHA1 accession compared to CHA accession were all identical toPaeonia obovata SHAN accession, indicating that CHA1 might be a hybrid result of CHA and SHAN. Another chloroplast coding region, rbcL showed lower variation rate and less phylogenetic information than the matK region in all four Paeonia species investigated in this study, while the 5S rRNA gene and nrDNA ITS region showed higher variation rate. However, combined phylogenetic relationship of all four peony species is more clearer than any single-locus one. This study would provide more sequence sources of peony species and help further understanding of the phylogenetic relationship. Key words: Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) barcoding, matK, nuclear ribosomaldeoxyribonucleic acid internal transcribed spacer (nrDNA ITS), Paeonia, phylogeny, ribulose-bisphosphate carboxylase (rbcL), 5S ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA).
Highlights
The traditional identification of herbal medicinal materials becomes difficult to satisfy increasing demands of safe use of medicinal herbs as a result of: (i) materials having similar morphological characters; (ii) materials sharing similar common names; (iii) the substitution of economically valuable materials with inexpensive herbs in wholesale markets; (iv) materials long fused and adulterated in folk; (v) processed materials or materials in powder form (Li et al, 2011)
In the maturase K (matK) coding region, most nucleotide variations pointed at the divergence between Paeonia suffruticosa (MO) and other three species, strongly supporting the phylogenetic evolution of section Paeonia and section Moutan in the Paeonia genus; the variable sites of Paeonia lactiflora CHA1 accession compared to CHA accession were all identical to Paeonia obovata SHAN accession, indicating that CHA1 might be a hybrid result of CHA and SHAN
RbcL showed lower variation rate and less phylogenetic information than the matK region in all four Paeonia species investigated in this study, while the 5S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene and nuclear ribosomal Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) (nrDNA) internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region showed higher variation rate
Summary
The traditional identification of herbal medicinal materials becomes difficult to satisfy increasing demands of safe use of medicinal herbs as a result of: (i) materials having similar morphological characters; (ii) materials sharing similar common names; (iii) the substitution of economically valuable materials with inexpensive herbs in wholesale markets; (iv) materials long fused and adulterated in folk; (v) processed materials or materials in powder form (Li et al, 2011). The interspecific variation is sometimes low in some cases, and the cloning should be required in some cases because of the presence of multiple copies and the problems of secondary structure resulting in poor-quality sequence data (Álvarez and Wendel, 2003) Another rDNA regions, 5S and 18S genes are considered to be one of the most variable regions commonly used in the identification of herbal medicinal materials (Chen et al, 2008; Meyer et al, 2010). Due to its high variability and discrimination ability, the 5S region has been show to successfully identify medicinal Epimedium L. species (Sun et al, 2004) This region has the significant problem of multiple copies, with molecular cloning needed in most cases
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