Identification of Apiaceae using ITS, ITS2 and psba-trnH barcodes

Apiaceae plants are used as medicinal herbs, pesticides, spices, and vegetables; thus, accurately identifying Apiaceae species is important. The grassland ecosystem of Heilongjiang Province in northern China has huge reserves of wild Apiaceae plants, but few reports have systematically documented their diversity. In this study, 275 Apiaceae plants of 23 species in 18 genera were collected from this area. We identified Apiaceae species by using nuclear internal transcribed spacer (ITS/ITS2) and psbA-trnH (chloroplast non-coding region) sequences based on experimental data. The identification efficiency of ITS, ITS2 and psbA-trnH sequences was determined and evaluated by sequence alignment and analysis, intraspecific and interspecific genetic distance analyses, and phylogenetic tree construction. ITS, ITS2 could distinguish 21 species from 17 genera of Apiaceae with good identification effect. When identifying species in the Apiaceae family, ITS2 can be used as the core barcode and psbA-trnH can be used as the supplementary barcode. These results can enrich the reference Apiaceae DNA barcode database.