BACKGROUND Selaginellaceae is a family of nonseed plants with special evolutionary significance. Plants of the family Selaginellaceae are similarly shaped and easily confused, complicating identification via traditional methods. This study explored, for the first time, the use of the DNA barcode ITS2 to identify medicinal plants of the Selaginellaceae family. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In...

Invasive fungal disease often plays an important role in the morbidity and mortality of immunocompromised patients. The poor sensitivity of current fungal blood culture and histological practices has led to the development of highly sensitive and specific molecular techniques, such as the PCR. Sequence variability of the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region of fungi is potentially useful...

BACKGROUND Chloroplast-encoded genes (matK and rbcL) have been formally proposed for use in DNA barcoding efforts targeting embryophytes. Extending such a protocol to chlorophytan green algae, though, is fraught with problems including non homology (matK) and heterogeneity that prevents the creation of a universal PCR toolkit (rbcL). Some have advocated the use of the nuclear-encoded, internal ...

AIM To develop and evaluate a TaqMan(TM) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the rapid identification and speciation of candida species. METHODS Species specific primer and probe sets were designed for the identification of Candida albicans, C. parapsilosis, C. tropicalis, C. krusei, C. kefyr, and C. glabrata from clinical isolates in a 5' exonuclease (TaqMan(TM)) assay. The probes were label...

BACKGROUND Herbal drugs used to treat illness according to Ayurveda are often misidentified or adulterated with similar plant materials. OBJECTIVE To aid taxonomical identification, we used DNA barcoding to evaluate authentic and substitute samples of herb and phylogenetic relationship of four medicinal plants of family Asparagaceace and Asclepiadaceae. MATERIALS AND METHODS DNA extracted f...

objective(s): fascioliasis is a zoonotic parasitic disease caused by liver fluke species of fasciola hepatica and fasciola gigantica. differentiation of these two species, based on their morphological characteristics, is difficult. the current study aimed to use pcr-rflp assay to distinguish between f. hepatica and f. gigantica , based on profiles of rflp, produced by effect of endonucleases on...