Establishment of DNA barcode identification platform for rare and endangered plants in China

In China's customs, when a certain plant is exported to the shore, it is necessary to determine what species it is; in some places, it is also necessary to identify what species the stolen trees belong to when the judicial case is settled However, there are many rare and endangered plants in China It is difficult to ensure the accuracy of identification by human eyes On December 20, the DNA barcode identification platform for rare and endangered plants in China was officially launched, providing technical support for the rapid and reliable identification of rare and endangered plants According to Zhou Shiliang, a researcher at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, most rare and endangered plants have important economic value, but they are very fragile In the early 1980s, the state began to legislate for the protection of rare and endangered plants However, driven by interests, illegal logging and smuggling of rare and endangered plants have occurred from time to time In some cases, due to the difficulty in material identification, criminals cannot be punished as they should It can be said that the rapid and reliable identification of rare and endangered plants has become one of the bottlenecks of their protection With the support of the Ministry of science and technology and NSFC, the State Key Laboratory of systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has built a DNA barcode identification platform for rare and endangered plants in China in 5 years It uses its high-resolution nuclear gene its and chloroplast gene ycf1 to effectively identify species; its reference sequence library contains most of the rare and endangered plants and their related species, with nearly 20000 sequences covering more than 120 families and 1400 species In addition, the identification results of the new platform are also connected with the "China rare and endangered plant information system" By clicking the species name, you can link to information such as morphology, pictures, distribution, etc.