ITS2 Secondary Structure Improves Discrimination between Medicinal "Mu Tong" Species when Using DNA Barcoding.

ABSTRACT: DNA barcoding is a promising species identification method, but it has proved difficult to find a standardized DNA marker in plant. Although the ITS/ITS2 RNA transcript has been proposed as the core barcode for seed plants, it has been criticized for being too conserved in some species to provide enough information or too variable in some species to align it within the different taxa ranks. We selected 30 individuals, representing 16 species and four families, to explore whether ITS2 can successfully resolve species in terms of secondary structure. Secondary structure was predicted using Mfold software and sequence-structure was aligned by MARNA. RNAstat software transformed the secondary structures into 28 symbol code data for maximum parsimony (MP) analysis. The results showed that the I

SUBMITTER: Zhang W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4488503 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature