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...

Abstract Drought stress is one of the most severe abiotic stresses affecting adversely plant growth, crop production, and various metabolic processes. Using seaweed extract in mitigating water adverse effects highly important for production. The present study discussed physiological role ( Sargassum denticulatum ) improving wheat tolerance to stress. Water (40% field capacity) caused significan...

Amomum villosum Lour., produced from Yangchun, Guangdong Province, China, is a Daodi medicinal material of Amomi Fructus in traditional Chinese medicine. This herb germplasm should be accurately identified and collected to ensure its quality and safety in medication. In the present study, single nucleotide polymorphism typing method was evaluated on the basis of DNA barcoding markers to identif...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Recent research on the history of Platanus reveals that hybridization phenomena occurred in the central American species. This study has two goals: to help resolve the evolutive puzzle of central American Platanus, and to test the potential of real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for detecting ancient hybridization. METHODS Sequencing of a uniparental plastid DNA mark...

BACKGROUND The concept of DNA barcoding for species identification has gained considerable momentum in animals because of fairly successful species identification using cytochrome oxidase I (COI). In plants, matK and rbcL have been proposed as standard barcodes. However, barcoding in complex genera is a challenging task. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We investigated the species discrimin...

Plant DNA barcoding currently relies on the application of a two-locus combination, matK + rbcL. Despite the universality of these two gene regions across plants, it is suspected that this combination might not have sufficient variation to discriminate closely related species. In this study, we tested the performance of this two-locus plant barcode along with the additional plastid regions trnH...

BACKGROUND Identification keys are decision trees which require the observation of one or more morphological characters of an organism at each step of the process. While modern digital keys can overcome several constraints of classical paper-printed keys, their performance is not error-free. Moreover, identification cannot be always achieved when a specimen lacks some morphological features (i....

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...