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...

Lithocarpus vuquangensis Ngoc & Hung is described from Vu Quang National Park, North Central Vietnam. The morphological comparison and phylogenetic analysis based on rbcL, matK and ITS provided evidence that the new species was not assignable to any of the previously known taxa in Vietnam and its surrounding countries. The description, photographs, preliminary conservation status and DNA barcod...

Phylogenetic relationships in Cornales were assessed using sequences rbcL and matK. Various combinations of outgroups were assessed for their suitability and the effects of long branches and outgroups on tree topology were examined using RASA 2.4 prior to conducting phylogenetic analyses. RASA identified several potentially problematic taxa having long branches in individual data sets that may ...

Many species of Schisandraceae are used in traditional Chinese medicine and are faced with contamination and substitution risks due to inaccurate identification. Here, we investigated the discriminatory power of four commonly used DNA barcoding loci (ITS, trnH-psbA, matK, and rbcL) and corresponding multi-locus combinations for 135 individuals from 33 species of Schisandraceae, using distance-,...

In Pinaceae, the chloroplast, mitochondrial, and nuclear genomes are paternally, maternally, and biparentally inherited, respectively. Examining congruence and incongruence of gene phylogenies among the three genomes should provide insights into phylogenetic relationships within the family. Here we studied intergeneric relationships of Pinaceae using sequences of the chloroplast matK gene, the ...

A universal barcode system for land plants would be a valuable resource, with potential utility in fields as diverse as ecology, floristics, law enforcement and industry. However, the application of plant barcoding has been constrained by a lack of consensus regarding the most variable and technically practical DNA region(s). We compared eight candidate plant barcoding regions from the plastome...