Abstract
DNA barcodes have been considered as a tool to facilitate species identification based on their simplicity and high-level accuracy compression to the complexity and subjective biases linked to morphological identification of taxa. MaturaseK gene “MatK” of the chloroplast is very crucial in the plant system which is involved in the group II intron splicing. The main objective of this current study is determining the relative utility of the “MatK” chloroplast gene for barcoding in fifteen legume trees by both single region and multiregional approaches. The chloroplast “MatK” gene sequences were submitted to GenBank and accession numbers (GenBank: LC602060, LC602154, LC602263, LC603347, LC603655, LC603845, LC603846, LC603847, LC604717, LC604718, LC605994, LC604799, LC605995, LC606468, LC606469) were obtained with sequence length ranging from 730 to 1545 nucleotides. These DNA sequences were aligned with database sequence using PROMALS server, Clustal Omega server and Bioedit program. Also, the maximum likelihood and neighbor-joining algorithms for phylogenetic reconstruction using the MEGA-X program were employed. Overall, these results indicated that the phylogenetic tree analysis and the evolutionary distances of an individual dataset of each species were agreed with a phylogenetic tree of all each other consisting of two clades, the first clade comprising (Enterolobium contortisiliquum, Albizia lebbek), Acacia saligna, Leucaena leucocephala, Dichrostachys Cinerea, (Delonix regia, Parkinsonia aculeata), (Senna surattensis, Cassia fistula, Cassia javanica) and Schotia brachypetala were more closely to each other, respectively. The remaining four species of Erythrina humeana, (Sophora secundiflora, Dalbergia Sissoo, Tipuana Tipu) constituted the second clade. Therefore, MatK gene is considered promising a candidate for DNA barcoding in plant family Fabaceae and providing a clear relationship between the families. Moreover, their sequences could be successfully utilized in single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) or part of the sequence as DNA fragment analysis utilizing polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in plant systematic.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
