Title
The utility of DNA barcodes to confirm the identification of palm collections in botanical gardens
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-1-2020
Publication Title
PLoS ONE
Volume
15
Abstract
Copyright: © 2020 Le et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The palm family (Arecaceae) is of high ecological and economic value, yet identification in the family remains a challenge for both taxonomists and horticulturalists. The family consists of approximately 2600 species across 181 genera and DNA barcoding may be a useful tool for species identification within the group. However, there have been few systematic evaluations of DNA barcodes for the palm family. In the present study, five DNA barcodes (rbcL, matK, trnH-psbA, ITS, ITS2) were evaluated for species identification ability across 669 samples representing 314 species and 100 genera in the Arecaceae, employing four analytical methods. The ITS gene region was found to not be a suitable barcode for the palm family, due in part, to low recovery rates and paralogous gene copies. Among the four analyses used, species resolution for ITS2 was much higher than that achieved with the plastid barcodes alone (rbcL, matK, trnH-psbA), and the barcode combination ITS2 + matK + rbcL gave the highest resolution among all single barcodes and their combinations, followed by ITS2 + matK. Among 669 palm samples analyzed, 110 samples (16.3%) were found to be misidentified. The 2992 DNA barcode sequences generated in this study greatly enriches the existing identification toolbox available to plant taxonomists that are interested in researching genetic relationships among palm taxa as well as for horticulturalists that need to confirm palm collections for botanical garden curation and horticultural applications. Our results indicate that the use of the ITS2 DNA barcode gene region provides a useful and cost-effective tool to confirm the identity of taxa in the Palm family.
Recommended Citation
Le, Duc Thanh; Zhang, Yu Qu; Xu, Yong; Guo, Li Xiu; Ruan, Zhi Ping; Burgess, Kevin S.; and Ge, Xue Jun, "The utility of DNA barcodes to confirm the identification of palm collections in botanical gardens" (2020). Faculty Bibliography. 2678.
https://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/bibliography_faculty/2678
