Abstract. In Malaysia, each race has its own traditional medicine practice which has existed for hundreds of years before the coming of modern medicine. Also, each race has many kinds of practices that had been around maintaining the health care of the respective community. All of these races or ethnic groups regard that it is very important for new mothers to be nursed back to health and thus each has its own specific and special postnatal or maternity care. The treatment during the postnatal or confinement period is generally considered to be good and safe and can help the new mother to gain back her health to the pre-pregnancy status. It is also belief that the ingredients used are natural and usually do not caused harm to the mother's condition. Hence, this paper is the result of the study on the traditional postnatal care practiced by the Malay, Chinese and Indian communities in Malaysia. This study was conducted through interviews and review of literature. The results obtained showed that there are a variety of treatments and practices during postnatal or confinement period for each of the race. In addition, traditional postnatal care during confinement are still being sought after and followed by the different races in Malaysia.
Imtiaz A, Mohd Nor SA, Md. Naim D. 2017. Review: Progress and potential of DNA barcoding for species identification of fish species. Biodiversitas 18: 1394-1405. DNA barcoding is a molecular technique to identify species by utilizing 600-800 base pairs genetic primer segments of mitochondrial gene cytochrome oxidase I. DNA barcoding has high potential to identify species into taxa, resolves ambiguousness in species identification, helps in accurate species identification, categorize species for conservation and also communize the information in the form of database system. The main challenge to this technique is regarding the use of barcoding information on ‘biological species concept’. The extreme diversity of fish and their economic importance has made this group a major target of DNA barcoding. DNA barcoding can assign the status of known to unknown sample but it also has the ability to detect previously un-sampled species as distinct. In this review, we present an overview of DNA barcoding and introduce current advances and limitation of this promising technique.
ABSTRACT. Plants have been used throughout human history for food and medicine. However, many plants are toxic, and cannot easily be morphologically distinguished from non-toxic plants. DNA identification solves this problem and is widely used. Nonetheless, plant DNA barcode identification faces a number of challenges, and many studies have been conducted to find suitable barcodes. The present study was conducted to test the efficiency of commonly used primers, namely ITS2, rpoC1, and trnH-psbA, in order to find the best DNA barcode markers for the identification of medicinal plants in Malaysia. Fresh leaves from 12 medicinal plants that are commonly used by Malay traditional healers were collected from the Tropical Spice Garden, Pulau Pinang, and subjected to polymerase chain reaction amplification using ITS2, rpoC1, and trnH-psbA DNA markers. We found that trnH-psbA is the best DNA marker for the species-level identification of medicinal plants in Malaysia.
ABSTRACT. The white-bellied sea eagle, Haliaeetus leucogaster, displays reversed sexual size dimorphism and is monomorphic for adult plumage coloration. Early attempts to identify sex in sexually monomorphic birds were based on morphological or chromosomal characters, but since avian W-specific DNA sequences were identified, PCR amplification has become commonly used for molecular sexing. We used a PCR test employing primers that amplify two homologous fragments of both the CHD-W gene, unique to females, and the CHD-Z gene, occurring in both sexes. This test was applied to five individuals of H. leucogaster from the Malacca Zoo and to male and female domestic chickens, Gallus domesticus, for comparison. All individuals were sexed successfully with high reproducibility. We conclude that this PCR-based test with feathers as the DNA source is a reliable sexing method for H. leucogaster. This sexing technique is objective and non-invasive and could be used to test sex ratio theories, as well as to help improve conservation and management actions for captive breeding program of this species in Malaysia.
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