The Promise of Molecular and Genomic Techniques for Biodiversity Research and DNA Barcoding of the Arabian Peninsula Flora

Abstract

The Arabian Peninsula is known to have a comprehensive and rich endowment of unique and genetically diverse plant genetic resources. Analysis and conservation of biological diversity is a crucial issue to the whole Arabian Peninsula. The rapid and accurate delimitation and identification of a species is crucial to genetic diversity analysis and the first critical step in the assessment of distribution, population abundance and threats related to a particular target species. During the last two decades, classical strategies of evaluating genetic variability, such as morphology and physiology, have been greatly complemented by phylogenetic, taxonomic, genetic diversity and breeding research molecular studies. At present, initiatives are taking place around the world to generate DNA barcode libraries for vascular plant flora and to make these data available in order to better understand, conserve and utilize biodiversity. The number of herbarium collection-based plant evolutionary genetics and genomics studies being conducted has been increasing worldwide. The herbaria provide a rich resource of already preserved and identified material, and these as well as freshly collected samples from the wild can be used for creating a reference DNA barcode library for the vascular plant flora of a region. This review discusses the main molecular and genomic techniques used in plant identification and biodiversity analysis. Hence, we highlight studies emphasizing various molecular techniques undertaken during the last 10 years to study the plant biodiversity of the Arabian Peninsula. Special emphasis on the role of DNA barcoding as a powerful tool for plant biodiversity analysis is provided, along with the crucial role of herbaria in creating a DNA barcode library.

Development of an environmental DNA metabarcoding assay for aquatic vascular plant communities

“…A plant metabarcoding study of eDNA extracted from soil concluded that rbcL and ITS2 provided better taxonomic resolution and had more complete reference databases—although this will vary by region—than either matK or the trnL P6 loop (Fahner et al., 2016). However, some barcoding studies have found greater species resolution from matK compared to either ITS2 and rbcL (Mosa et al., 2019), or to rbcL and trnH‐psbA (Scriver et al., 2015). Additionally, no single marker has revealed a barcoding gap, in which interspecific sequence divergence consistently exceeds intraspecific sequence divergence, across all plant taxonomic comparisons.…”

“…Additionally, no single marker has revealed a barcoding gap, in which interspecific sequence divergence consistently exceeds intraspecific sequence divergence, across all plant taxonomic comparisons. ITS might be more likely to show a gap than the commonly used plastid markers (Gill et al., 2019; Kuzmina et al., 2018), although this can be influenced by factors such as the relatedness of the taxa being compared (Gill et al., 2019) and the biogeographic region under consideration (Mosa et al., 2019). There is a clear lack of consensus on the most useful markers for plant barcoding and metabarcoding.…”

Botanic, Phytochemistry and Pharmacological Aspects of Phyllanthus Amarus Schum. & Thonn. as Powerful Tools to Improve its Biotechnological Studies

“…So, best-suited molecular assay for fingerprinting and assessing genetic relationship among genotypes shows their own advantages and limitations. In this sense, among the available biotechnological analysis of plant genetic diversity and DNA fingerprinting still not available an ideal technique that had yet fulfil all requirements needed by plant researchers [30][31][32][33].…”

Biopiracy: Abolish Corporate Hijacking of Indigenous Medicinal Entities

“…Advantages Disadvantages References Next-generation sequencing (NGS) (i) No prior sequence information or probe generation is required (i) High in cost and not available in all laboratories (ii) Time-consuming and high data store required [55] Simple sequence repeats (SSR) and intersimple sequence repeats (ISSR) (i) Readily use for taxonomic studies (i) Allele sizes often differ from different laboratories Lack of potential in discriminating species in hypervariables (ii) Occurrence of null alleles complicate the interpretation of data because heterozygotes cannot be identified, and reaction failures cannot be detected [56,57] Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) (i) No prior sequence information or probe generation is needed (i) AFLP generates huge quantities of information technically demanding in the laboratory and, especially, in data analysis (ii) Interspecies genetic hybrids in the genus are difficult to identify [58] Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) (i) Producing DNA patterns that allow comparison of many loci simultaneously (i) Low cost (i) It may not be practical to identify the species of origin in products containing mixtures of species (ii) It does not seem to be adequate for analysis of severely degraded material, as in autoclaved samples [59,60] e Scientific World Journal utilizing their unique natural resources and traditional indigenous knowledge and thus not being a pray of corporate hijacking.…”