Conserving the biodiversity of Kuwait through DNA barcoding the flora
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Date
30/11/2017Author
Abdullah, Mansour Taleb
Metadata
Abstract
Biodiversity across the globe is threatened. Rapid surveying and monitoring
techniques are required to understand the origin of the threats to biodiversity and to
enable conservation actions to be undertaken. Kuwait is an arid desert country with a
small flora of only 402 species. This flora is endangered by environmental factors,
overgrazing, and human activities. DNA barcoding the flora and using Next
Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies allowed us to identify plants to species
level, conduct a molecular taxonomic revision, and distinguish plant diversity found
in soil environmental DNA samples. After investigating the discriminatory power of
five commonly used DNA markers from plastid (matK, rbcL, trnH-psbA, trnL) and a
nuclear genome (ITS2) on four largest genera of the flora using phylogenetics
reconstruction tree based methods, two barcoding markers (rbcL and ITS2) were
assigned to build a DNA reference library of the flora. Furthermore, the DNA
reference library was tested to identify the plant diversity found below-ground level
and comparing it with that above-ground, using environmental soil samples collected
from both species rich and poor habitats in Kuwait by applying high-throughput
sequencing methods. The DNA database provided in this study could be used as a
reference library for the identification process and contribute towards the future of
molecular taxonomy, biodiversity and ecological research in Kuwait.