Evaluation of the discriminatory power of plant dna barcodes rbcl & matk between species of fabaceae

For species identification, .DNA barcoding is a novel diagnostic technique, the aim of which is to contribute towards wide range of ecological and conservation studies. In this study, we evaluated the capacity of the core DNA barcodes rbcla and matK for identifying 62 plant specimen belonging to 22 species of Fabaceae. All plant specimen were collected from district Dera Ghazi Khan, Punjab, Pakistan. In this research work, highest mean pairwise interspecific distance showed by matK and lowest for rbcl. Based on ‘best match’ and ‘best close match’ analysis function of TaxonDNA , both matK and rbcl was best with almost 73% correct identification, while based on ‘all species barcodes’ analysis, rbcl and matK gave the lowest percentage of correct species identifications 64.51% & 51.11%, respectively. By using MEGA5, for each marker neighbor joining (N/J) trees based on Kimur-2-parameter (K2P) were produced. In tree based analysis, species were considered to be discriminated. that form separate clusters in the tree with a bootstrap support >50%.. In this study both plant DNA barcodes in combination (rbcl +matK) showed best discriminatory power between different species of Fabaceae.