DNA barcoding coupled with high resolution melting for rapid identification of Ardisia gigantifolia and its toxic adulterants

Abstract

Ardisia gigantifolia is a medicinal plant; its herbal medicinal product has played important roles in the ways of life of people in China. However, commercial products of this herbal medicine are frequently adulterated with Rhododendron molle root and Clerodendrum cyrtophyllum stem. In fact, R. molle has hepatotoxic effects which could pose health issues to the end user. In this study, we applied DNA barcoding coupled with high resolution melting (Bar-HRM) to distinguish A. gigantifolia and adulterant products. Two DNA barcode loci (ITS2 and psbA-trnH) were chosen for Bar-HRM analysis. We found that ITS2 and psbA-trnH regions contain some inter-species variability, which showed enough discrimination capability for Bar-HRM analysis. We applied the Bar-HRM method to test the method, and found that some products labelled as “A. gigantifolia” collected from local markets in China were identified to contain C. cyrtophyllum. Our study demonstrated that DNA barcoding coupled with high resolution melting can be used as a routine test to guarantee the quality of A. gigantifolia herbal products.

Keywords:

• Ardisia gigantifolia
• DNA barcoding
• ITS2 and psbA-trnH
• Bar-HRM
• Rapid identification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

All data generated during this study are available at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13042928).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Major Scientific and Technological Special Project for “Significant New Drugs Creation” under Grant (2014ZX09201021), and the project of improving the basic scientific research ability of young and middle-aged teachers in Guangxi Universities in 2020 (2020KY12031).