Identification of Vine Herbs Using DNA Barcoding Method
基于DNA条形码的藤类药材鉴定

This study was aimed to discriminate 14 types of vine herbs of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. The second internal transcribed spacer (ITS2) of ribosomal DNA was amplified and sequenced. Sequence assembly and consensus sequence generation were performed using the CodonCode Aligner. Phylogenetic study was performed using software MEGA 4.0 in accordance with the Kimura 2-Parameter (K2P) model. And the phylogenetic tree was constructed using neighbor-joining (NJ) methods. The results showed that the length of ITS2 sequence of 14 studied vine herbs was from 190 bp to 284 bp. The intraspecific genetic distance (K2P distance) of vine herbs is between 0 and 0.053, which was far lower than their interspecific genetic distance (mean: 0.852, the smallest: 0.309). In the cluster dendrogram, all studied medicinal materials with several samples showed monophyletic, and meanwhile, distinguished from others. It was concluded that ITS2 barcode is suitable for the identification of vine herbs from the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. This method will play an important role in the identification of Chinese Materia Medica.