ABSTRACT
The identification of traditional Chinese herbs(TCH) is very important in the quality control system of TCH.The development of the TCH identification techniques has improved the quality evaluation level of TCH.By so far,the TCH identification techniques have been developed from traditional pharmacognostic identification methods based on cell and sub-cell to genetic DNA(gDNA) level.It is a tendency to use DNA microarray to identify the species of TCH in recent years.In this review,a new method called suppression subtraction hybridization and DNA array(SSH-array) was introduced,which combined the SSH technique with microarray hybridization based on nylon film.Five plants from Dendrobium Sw.were used as experimental materials.Firstly the differential gDNA fragments between two species by SSH-array were obtained and then the diferential gDNA fragments with the microarrays made up of multiple whole genomes from several species were hybridized to screen the uniqued gDNA fragments for one species.The screened unique gDNA fragment can be used as species-specific probes for identifying the species.Based on the method,a procedure for species identification of TCH was established with gDNA microarray and its applied prospects were discussed.