Molecular Classification of Some Plant Taxa Using MatK and trnH-psbA Barcode Genes

Abstract

The classification of living creatures and the demarcation of living units have been one of the most complex problems encountered as a result of observing experimental and systematic information. For this purpose, researchers have tried to determine the diversity of living creatures by developing many theories and methods. Although the nuclear genome barcode regions contain much more information than the barcode regions of plastid, they do not have enough information to compare different plant groups when barcoding with a single locus. A single barcode region that can be used in all plant species is not yet available, and therefore, the use of different barcode regions may increase the distinguishing power of species. Main objective of this study was to determine gene, gene region and numbers of genes suitable for plant molecular phylogentic studies. In this study, matK, and trnH-psbA barcode genes were used to evaluate the phylogenetic relationship of 60 plant species belonging to 15 different plant families. Sequences were aligned with MAFFT (Multiple Alignment Using Fast Fourier Transform) software and a consensus phylogenetic tree was constructed by the Bayesian method. Results indicated that matK gene was much more suitaable in comparison to trnH-psbA region since the use of matK produced trees with higher posterior probability values. However, further studies clearly showed that increased number of genes produced much better phylogenetic estimations.

Keywords

• Phylogeny
• molecular systematics
• bioinformatics
• barcode gene