Authentication of medicinal plants by DNA markers

Abstract

Medicinal plants have been used worldwide for centuries to maintain health and to treat diseases, more so chronic diseases. However, adulteration and use of spurious materials as substitutes have become a major concern for users and industry for reasons of safety and efficacy. Therefore, authentication of medicinal plants is of utmost importance. Morphological, anatomical, chemical and DNA markers solve the problem by differentiating the genuine material from the adulterants, substitutes and spurious drugs. DNA markers use nucleotide sequences to identify species; it takes preference over the other two markers being not age dependent, tissue specific and having a higher discriminating power. Therefore, characterization of plants with such markers is an ideal approach for identification of medicinal plant species and populations/varieties of the same species. Availability of certified taxonomic specimens in herbaria is certainly required for unambiguous confirmation through final visual comparison and analysis.

Induction of Herbicide resistance via seed-derived rice (Oryza sativa) Calli

“…DNAbased markers are less affected by age, physiological condition of samples and environmental factors of plant tissues. They are not tissue specific and thus can be detected at any phase of organism development [42].The identified AFLP marker in the present research is potentially useful in developing HR rice varieties and can imply in breeding programs in future. Use of plant tissue culture techniques in development of HR provides several benefits such as less labor intention and rapid propagation.…”

DNA Fingerprinting Profile and Quality Control Standardization of Folklore Medicinal Plant Exacum lawii

“…In the RAPD method, random short synthetic oligonucleotide primers are used to amplify the genomic DNA through polymerase chain reaction under low annealing temperature up to 28° C-38° C. The DNA fragments generated are separated on agarose gels based on sizes and compared with marker. 35 In the present study 2 gene combination of ribulose-1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase large subunit (rbcL) and maturase K (matK) as the standard plant barcode were chosen. 36 These two loci of chloroplast DNA were taken due to their efficient recovery of good quality sequences and high levels of species discrimination.…”

Genetic diversity of rice from Iran region assessed by simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers

“…Molecular marker technology, however, has improved breeders' ability to accurately identify and characterize genetic resources. DNA markers use nucleotide sequences to identify species (Ganie et al, 2015) and microsatellites or single sequence repeats (SSRs) are extensively employed in plant genetics studies, using both low and high throughput genotyping approaches (Vieira et al, 2016). Polymorphic DNA was chosen to characterize rice germplasm because it satisfies these criteria.…”