Evaluation on genetic relationships among China’s endemic Curcuma L. herbs by mtDNA

Abstract

Six mitochondrial (mtDNA) markers, cox2, ccmFn, ccb256, cox3, Nad4L-orf25, and atp4, were combined to assess genetic relationships by using Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Maximum parsimony (MP). This was done among nine Chinese Curcuma herbal species, included two rare species which are difficult to distinguish from their morphological characters. The relationships are very close among the nine species, and the overall distance was 0.018. In this study, the backbone of such nine species was achieved firstly to date, and being divided into two groups with moderate to strong bootstrap support. Both the ML and MP tree were obtained with similarity topologies of the same group except for partial divergences of deep relationships. The highlights is that Curcuma genus was divided into two strong supported groups in the ML tree, Group I ([[C. kwangsiensis, C. phaeocaulis], [C. chuanhuangjiang, C. aromatica], C. yunnanensis]) with 89 BS (bootstrap) support, Group II ([[[C. longa, C. sichuanensis], C. amarissima], C. wenyujin]) with 98 BS support.