Assessing DNA barcodes species discriminating ability and phylogenetic relation within Embelia species

Abstract

Member of Embelia is economically important medicinal plants. Embelia ribes is red listed endangered species. DNA barcodes Interspersed Transcribed Spacer (ITS), matK, rbcL, and psbA-trnH were selected for its species discrimination ability using TaxonDNA software and tree-based maximum likelihood monophyly analysis. The results showed that the species identification success rate of psbA-trnL and ITS+ psbA-trnL combination has high success rate “best match” and “best close match” functions on TaxonDNA. Among the barcodes employed, plastid psbA-trnL showed the highest success rate followed by ITS and rbcL while matK had the weak discriminating ability. In the concatenated sequences, the high discriminating rate was seen in ITS+psbA, ITS+matK+rbcL, and ITS+matK+rbcL+psbA. In the tree-based analysis, disjunct distribution of the E. ribes species was observed in the ITS phylogeny. It is necessary to know the discriminatory ability of single or combinations of barcodes to detect variation at the inter and intraspecies levels.