Title

Phylogenetic analysis of chloroplast matK gene from Zingiberaceae for plant DNA barcoding

Authors

Dhivya Selvaraj¹, Rajeev Kumar Sarma¹ and Ramalingam Sathishkumar^1, *

Affiliation

¹Department of Biotechnology, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India

Email

sathishkumar_ram@hotmail.com; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

received May 08, 2008; revised June 18, 2008; accepted July 20, 2008; published September 08, 2008

Abstract

MaturaseK gene (MatK) of chloroplast is highly conserved in plant systematics which is involved in Group II intron splicing. The size of the gene is 1500 bp in length, located with in the intron of trnK. In the present study, matK gene from Zingiberaceae was taken for the analysis of variants, parsimony site, patterns, transition/tranversion rates and phylogeny. The family of Zingiberaceae comprises 47 genera with medicinal values. The matK gene sequence have been obtained from genbank and used for the analysis. The sequence alignments were performed by Clustal X, transition/transversion rates were predicted by MEGA and phylogenetic analyses were carried out by PHYLIP package. The result indicates that the Zingiberaceae genus Afromonum, Alpinia, Globba, Curcuma and Zingiber shows polyphylogeny. The overall variants between the species are 24% and transition/transversion rate is 1.54. Phylogenetic tree was designed to identify the ideal regions that could be used for defining the inter and interageneric relationships. From this study it could be concluded that the matK gene is a good candidate for DNA barcoding of plant family Zingiberaceae.

Keywords

maturaseK; Zingiberaceae; transition/transversion; phylogenetic tree; consistency index; retention index; MEGA; PHYLIP

Citation

Selvaraj et al., Bioinformation 3(1): 24-27 (2008)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.