RESUMEN
DNA barcoding has been widely used for herb identification in recent decades,enabling safety and innovation in the field of herbal medicine.In this article,we summarize recent progress in DNA bar-coding for herbal medicine to provide ideas for the further development and application of this tech-nology.Most importantly,the standard DNA barcode has been extended in two ways.First,while conventional DNA barcodes have been widely promoted for their versatility in the identification of fresh or well-preserved samples,super-barcodes based on plastid genomes have rapidly developed and have shown advantages in species identification at low taxonomic levels.Second,mini-barcodes are attractive because they perform better in cases of degraded DNA from herbal materials.In addition,some mo-lecular techniques,such as high-throughput sequencing and isothermal amplification,are combined with DNA barcodes for species identification,which has expanded the applications of herb identification based on DNA barcoding and brought about the post-DNA-barcoding era.Furthermore,standard and high-species coverage DNA barcode reference libraries have been constructed to provide reference se-quences for species identification,which increases the accuracy and credibility of species discrimination based on DNA barcodes.In summary,DNA barcoding should play a key role in the quality control of traditional herbal medicine and in the international herb trade.
RESUMEN
DNA barcoding, widely used and applied in identifying animal species, has become one of the hot topics in the study of biology over the past decade; However, it is encountered bottlenecks because none of the available loci work across all plant species. The most candidate DNA barcodes include single-locus barcodes (matK, rbcL, etc.) and multi-locus barcodes (rbcL + trnH-psbA, etc.). Here, we review the development of candidate barcodes and the application in the identification of medicinal plants. We also discuss the feasibility of using the complete chloroplast genome as "super-barcode" and expect to provide a new approach for fast and accurate identifications of traditional Chinese medicinal plants.