ANALYSIS OF DNA BARCODE REGION ITS AND MATK IN SOME POLYSCIAS PLANTS OF VIETNAM

Abstract

Many polyscias species are herbal plants belonging to the Polycias genus which are valuable in traditional medicine. Active ingredients in leaves and roots of Policias plant includes saponins, vitamins and amino acid that are essential compounds in herb medicine. Although these species have been studied and used for many years, studies on genetic diversity are limited. Nowadays, with the development of barcoding DNA technology, the genetic diversity of plants has begun to be studied at the molecular level instead of based on morphological characteristics. The study was conducted with five samples including P. fruticosa, P. scutellaria, P. serrata Balf, P. filicifolia, P. balfouriana. In this research, we performed amplification, sequencing and analysis of ITS and MatK regions to identify the marker DNA regions for these species. The results showed the ITS and MatK sequences of these five species had high similarities with polyscias sequences on the Gene Bank. In addition, the ITS region has many DNA polymorphisms in sequence. The distinguished by ITS sequence is more clear than the MatK sequence in terms of genetic distance between species of the Polyscias genus and the Araliaceae family. These results provide the DNA barcoding sequences to contribute to the research on evaluation, taxonomy and gene conservation in medicinal plants of the Policias genus.