Heliotropium indicum L. and Heliotropium keralense Sivar. & Manilal, J.: DNA Barcoding Studies for Species Identity

Abstract

The family Boraginaceae comprises around 2000 species within 145 genera with a myriad of therapeutic and pharmacological attributes. Kerala holds 26 species of Boraginaceae members coming under 9 genera. The genus Heliotropium comprises 8 species where Heliotropium indicum L.  and Heliotropium keralense Sivar. & Manilal, J. is commonly found in Kerala. H. keralense is endemic to Kerala. Only minute morphological differences can be noticed between these two species. The present available data suggests the idea that only morphological characters are used to demarcate these two plants into two species. Hence an authentication is an immediate necessity for confirming the taxonomic identity of these plants. The present study aims to inspect whether these plants can be categorized into different species or not and DNA barcoding is used to clarify the dispute. Here, highly conserved regions of the genome, especially short stretches (~600 bp) are used to differentiate species-level taxonomy. The DNA barcode marker used in this technique is Rbcl and sequence analysis was performed using online tool BLAST of NCBI  database and based on maximum identity score E value top most sequences was utilized for multiple sequence alignment (Clustal W2) and dendrogram was also constructed. The differences in DNA sequence and amino acid composition clearly specifies that Heliotropium indicum L. and Heliotropium keralense Sivar. & Manilal, J. can be categorized into two species.