Molecular identification of species with distribution records in China using DNA barcode technology.

species is one of the main plant resources that produce agarwood, which containing black resin with important economic and medicinal values. There are about 15 species known to the genus around the world, but only two can be found in China, i.e. and . In this study, and that endemic respectively to Hainan and Yunnan were sampled, on the basis of the investigation and observation of their main morphological features in plantation. Five primers, i.e. ITS2, , , and , were eventually selected for DNA barcoding. The results showed that the seed surface of is smooth or sparsely pubescent, and the seed appendages were long. While the seed surface of is densely covered with yellow hairs and the seed appendages are short. The sequence fragment has significant intraspecific and interspecific genetic distances. However, the species identification success rate of ITS2+ combination was finally screened to be the highest, which was verified by the BBA method of TaxonDNA. The phylogenetic trees cluster analysis revealed that the classification of and is significant, and there is geographic isolation between the two species. Therefore, on the premise of accurate identification of plant morphological characters, ITS2+ combination can be used to accurately identify the species in China.