MU pioneers new plant DNA barcoding technique
Source: The Sangai Express
Imphal, May 08 2018:
Scientific investigators from the Department of Life Sciences, Manipur University have pioneered a probable new plant DNA barcoding technique.
The original research article 'The Use of the Hypervariable P8 Region of trL(UAA) Intron for Identification of Orchid Species: Evidence from Restriction Site Polymorphism Analysis' co-authored by Dr Rajkumar Kishor and Prof GJ Sharma was published in PLoS One, one of the world's leading scientific journals on May 2 last.
The research highlight of the article is the utilization of the hypervariable DNA locus, the P8 intron region of the transfer RNA encoding the amino acid leucine, as a potential DNA barcode for identification of natural orchid species in certain group of vandaceous orchids.
Their investigation reports on successful discrimination of 95.9 percent of the orchid species being investigated based on restriction site polymorphism and sequence length variation of the DNA region.
It may be mentioned that may investigators across the globe have been trying to develop a standard plant DNA barcoding tool using either a single locus or multiple loci systems.
However, there has not been a consensus locus or loci suitable as a universal plant DNA barcode.
With this primary discovery, the authors hinted at exploring its use to discriminate the plant species across all the families of flowering and non-flowering ranging from algae to angiosperms.
Dr Rajkumar Kishor worked as a Senior Research Associate of the CSIR underthe supervisionof Prof GJ Sharma of the Department of Life Sciences, Manipur University.