Authentication of medicinal plants by DNA markers

Medicinal plants have been used worldwide for centuries to maintain health and to treat diseases, more so chronic diseases. However, adulteration and use of spurious materials as substitutes have become a major concern for users and industry for reasons of safety and efficacy. Therefore, authenticat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Plant gene 2015-12, Vol.4, p.83-99
Main Authors: Ganie, Showkat Hussain, Upadhyay, Priti, Das, Sandip, Prasad Sharma, Maheshwer
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adulteration
Authentication
DNA markers
Medicinal plants
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Summary:Medicinal plants have been used worldwide for centuries to maintain health and to treat diseases, more so chronic diseases. However, adulteration and use of spurious materials as substitutes have become a major concern for users and industry for reasons of safety and efficacy. Therefore, authentication of medicinal plants is of utmost importance. Morphological, anatomical, chemical and DNA markers solve the problem by differentiating the genuine material from the adulterants, substitutes and spurious drugs. DNA markers use nucleotide sequences to identify species; it takes preference over the other two markers being not age dependent, tissue specific and having a higher discriminating power. Therefore, characterization of plants with such markers is an ideal approach for identification of medicinal plant species and populations/varieties of the same species. Availability of certified taxonomic specimens in herbaria is certainly required for unambiguous confirmation through final visual comparison and analysis. •DNA markers have upper hand in indentifying medicinal plants compared to other markers•Of the various DNA markers, LAMP, SCAR and DNA barcoding are ideal for authentication•DNA markers are used to build a reference library of traditional medicine.
ISSN:2352-4073
2352-4073
DOI:10.1016/j.plgene.2015.10.002