It is long believed that some spices may help protect against certain chronic conditions. Spices are usually parts of plants that have been powdered into small pieces. Have you ever wondered what the curry powder in your dish is made of? The aim of this work was to develop an appropriate DNA-based method for assessment of spice identity. Selecting the best marker for species recognition in the ...

BACKGROUND Smithia conferta Sm. is an annual herb widely used in Indian traditional medical practice and commonly known as "Lakshman booti" in Sanskrit. Morphological resemblance among the species of genus Smithia Aiton. leads to inaccurate identification and adulteration. This causes inconsistent therapeutic effects and also affects the quality of herbal medicine. AIM This study aimed to gen...

Lauraceae are an important component of tropical and subtropical forests and have major ecological and economic significance. Owing to lack of clear-cut morphological differences between genera and species, this family is an ideal case for testing the efficacy of DNA barcoding in the identification and discrimination of species and genera. In this study, we evaluated five widely recommended pla...

Caryophyllaceae is a large angiosperm family, with many species being utilized as ornamental or medicinal plants in Korea, addition to several endangered that are managed by the government. In this study, we used DNA barcoding for accurate identification of Korean Caryophyllaceae. A total 78 taxa (n = 215) were sequenced based on three chloroplast regions (rbcL, matK, and psbA–trnH) nuclear rib...

The Araucaria Forests in southern Brazil are part of the Atlantic Rainforest, a key hotspot for global biodiversity. This habitat has experienced extensive losses of vegetation cover due to commercial logging and the intense use of wood resources for construction and furniture manufacturing. The absence of precise taxonomic tools for identifying Araucaria Forest tree species motivated us to tes...

Species of genus Tripterygium (Celastraceae) have attracted much attention owing to their excellent effect on treating autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. However, due to high market demand causing overexploitation, natural populations of genus Tripterygium have rapidly declined. Tripterygium medicinal materials are mainly collected from the wild, making the quality of medicinal materials uns...

Interspecific crosses between the more than 520 Passiflora species may or not be compatible. The sequences ITS, matK, psbA-trnH, rbcL and trnL-F were used to confirm identity estimate genetic distances among 48 accessions of a germplasm bank. Twenty for within distinct subgenera. phylogenetic resolution based on ITS data was superior that any single chloroplast marker, recommending it as DNA ba...

Previous studies of the small Southern Hemisphere family Atherospermataceae have drawn contradictory conclusions regarding the number of transantarctic disjunctions and role of transoceanic dispersal in its evolution. Clarification of intergeneric relationships is critical to resolving (1) whether the two Chilean species, Laurelia sempervirens and Laureliopsis philippiana, are related to differ...

T he goal of DNA barcoding is conceptually simple: Find one or a few regions of DNA that will distinguish among the majority of the world’s species, and sequence these from diverse sample sets to produce a large-scale reference library of life on earth (1). This approach can then be used as a tool for species identification and to help in the discovery of new species (2). Since the first DNA ba...