In 2009, the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) Plant Working Group proposed the chloroplast gene rbcL and matK as the core barcodes of plant species, as well as intergenic sequence trnH- psbA and nuclear gene ITS as the supplement barcodes 4.
It has been developing rapidly in recent years 2, and become a useful tool for biodiversity investigation and monitoring, and molecular phylogeny and evolution 3. When the phylogenetic relationships were built with random fragment combinations, optimal evolutionary tree with high supporting values were established using the combinations of rbcL + matK + trnH- psbA in tropical cloud forests.ĭNA barcoding is a standard gene fragment 1 for species identification. The success rates of species identification of the four fragments were higher than 41.00% ( rbcL: 41.50% ± 2.81%, matK: 42.88% ± 2.59%, trnH-psbA: 46.16% ± 5.11% and ITS: 47.20% ± 5.76%), demonstrating that these fragments have potentiality in species identification. We tested the universality of tree species DNA barcodes including rbcL, matK, trnH- psbA and ITS, and examined their abilities of species identification and phylogenetic construction in three tropical cloud forests. But present studies have far reached a consistent result on the universality of DNA barcoding. DNA barcoding is a useful tool for species identification and phylogenetic construction.