Hernández-Rosario, Lumariz

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    DNA barcoding of the Solanaceae family in Puerto Rico including endangered and endemic species
    (2019) Hernández-Rosario, Lumariz; Siritunga, Dimuth; College of Arts and Sciences - Sciences; Rodríguez Minguela, Carlos M.; Van Ee, Benjamin; Department of Biology; Segarra Carmona, Alejandro E.
    The Solanaceae family is one of the largest and well distributed plant families in the world. It contains species with agricultural and economical importance such as potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes and peppers. In Puerto Rico there are approximately 46 species of Solanaceae of which six are endemic: Brunfelsia densifolia, B. lactea, B. portoricensis, Goetzea elegans, Solanum ensifolium and S. woodburyi. The objective of this project was to use DNA barcoding to identify the Solanaceae species in Puerto Rico, including the endemics, and to assess the genetic relationships between them. To this end, two chloroplast regions (psbA-trnH and matK) and a nuclear region (ITS) were PCR- amplified, sequenced and submitted to comparative sequence analysis. Phylogenetic trees of single and concatenated regions were generated from sequences from different taxa obtained in this study and from deposited species in GenBank database. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that DNA barcoding can be used to discriminate at the species level among these taxa in Puerto Rico. For all three markers, the genus that showed the highest pairwise distance specific value between represented species was Solanum, while the genus that displayed the least was Capsicum with 0.000 p-distance value. The results show that this technique can be used to identify species with one, two, or three combinations of DNA barcode markers depending on the taxon. In addition, this is the first study to include the endemic species Solanum woodburyi in a molecular phylogenetic analysis, and it was found to have a close relationship with S. ensifolium, also endemic to Puerto Rico, and to S. bahamense from the Bahamas and Greater Antilles. Therefore, we suggest the inclusion of Solanum woodburyi as part of the Bahamense clade.