González Avilés, Edlín

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    Assessing the species relationship of the bamboo collection at USDA-Tropical Agricultural Research Station at Mayaguez, Puerto Rico through DNA barcoding
    (2019-12-09) González Avilés, Edlín; Siritunga, Dimuth; College of Arts and Sciences - Sciences; Rodriguez Minguela, Carlos M.; Van Ee, Benjamin; Department of Biology; Segarra, Alejandro
    Bamboo is a grass that belongs to the subfamily Bambusoideae and has approximately 1400 different species distributed in 116 genera. This plant has been widely used by humans as a source of food, shelter, clothing and furniture, among others. However, despite of its usefulness, the taxonomy of this complex group has traditionally relied on morphological traits that tend to vary in response to growth conditions. This lack of consistent morphological traits in conjunction with the infrequent flowering behavior observed across species, constitute a major barrier for the establishment of an accurate classification system. Therefore, the implementation of DNA-based molecular techniques for species identification could be of great significance in the development of a more effective characterization scheme for the bamboo subfamily. The objective of this project was to use a DNA barcoding technique to assess the relationships between 55 different bamboo species from the USDA-Tropical Agricultural Research Station (TARS) and to identify species relationships between this collection and native bamboo species from Puerto Rico. To this end, four chloroplast regions from each were PCR-amplified and sequenced in this study. Moreover, the coding regions matK and rbcL were used, as well as two intergenic regions, trnH-psbA and trnT-trnL. Single markers and combined concatenated sequences were used to produce NJ Trees to evaluate the relationships patterns across the examined taxa. Despite the low resolution obtained, tribe Arundinarieae members clustered apart from tribe Bambuseae whereas the tropical woody bamboo tribe was separated into two main groups, one consisting of the paleotropical species and the other comprised of the neotropical species. Native Puerto Rican species grouped with the cluster of neotropical species. In dendrograms constructed from the aligment of concatenated partial sequences the specie Bonia saxatilis unexpectedly clustered with tribe Arundinarieae wich according to the latest classification, this specie belongs to tribe Bambuseae. In contrast, Bonia saxatilis was previously classified as Indocalamus solidus in tribe Arundinarieae, which is where the clustering in this study places it.