Utility of DNA Barcoding for Plant Biodiversity Conservation

DNA barcoding is a technique that provides rapid identification of species without using morphological cues. The method employs relatively small-standardized DNA fragments as tags to define or discover species. In plants, the mitochondrial genome evolves much more slowly than in animals. There is currently no consensus on which candidate markers comprise the best plant DNA barcoding region; however, DNA barcodes such as rbcL, matK, psbA-trnH and ITS have been proposed for the plant kingdom. And also very recently the chloroplast intergenic spacer (IGS) like trnE-trnT, trnT- psbD, ndhF-rpl32 and rpl14-rpl16 were also employed for discriminating the cultivar species. The region ITS2 showed better intra-species variation, followed by psbA-trnH. Several analyses reveal that the ITS2 region is able to distinguish all tested species of the plant kingdom, but evaluations of DNA barcodes have to be conducted for more species covering many genera to confirm the above results. In this review we discussed the current view of DNA barcoding.