Planta Med 2009; 75 - PB21
DOI: 10.1055/s-0029-1234433

Authentication of plants in Astragalus by DNA Barcoding technique

T Gao 1, XH Pang 1, SL Chen 1
  • 1Institute of Medicinal Plant Development, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Peking Union Medical College, No. 151 Malianwa North Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100193 China

Astragalus possesses important medicinal efficacy in Fabaceae, with a large number of medicinal plants and poisonous plants. However, it is arduous to identify some of the species in this genus because of morphological similarity and frequent variation. In this study, The DNA barcode, a short DNA sequence originating from the genome, was firstly investigated for the plants in Astragalus. We compared sequences of six potential barcodes, four coding (trnH-psbA, rpoC1, rbcL, matK) chloroplast regions and two noncoding (ITS, ITS2) nuclear ribosomal DNA among 319 different species of Astragalus. The results were as follows: 1. The amplification efficiency for six candidate DNA barcodes decreased successively, rpoC1> trnH-psbA= ITS2> matK> ITS> rbcL. 2. The intraspecific variation and interspecific variation of six promising markers showed that trnH-psbA, ITS2 and ITS were the more discriminatory regions. While other three plastid regions were of lower divergences. 3. In this study different species of Astragalus can be differentiated effectively by comparing the DNA barcoding regions. Overall, our findings indicated that DNA barcoding is an efficient and powerful taxonomic tool in Astragalus.

Acknowledgements: The International Cooperation Program of Science and Technology (No. 2007DFA30990), the Special Founding for Healthy Field (No. 200802043).

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