Rapid identification of medicinal herbs through plant Direct-PCR

Direct-PCR technology was using a 15 minutes heat-lysis step instead of DNA extraction to get DNA templates with small amount of plant materials followed by sensitive PCR process to amplify target genes. In order to facilitate DNA barcoding in medicinal herb identification with Direct-PCR, we collected different tissues from 80 medicinal plants as material to amplify the ITS fragments. Through optimizing the PCR reaction, ITS of 80 plant samples was all successfully amplified. PCR products were sequenced and to do Blast analysis. These results suggest that Direct-PCR would improve the efficiency of DNA barcoding in the application of medicinal herb molecular authentication.