Authentication of garlic ( L.) supplements using a mini-barcode.

Garlic (), a widely distributed plant with great cultural and medicinal significance, is one of the most popular herbal dietary supplements in Europe and North America. Garlic supplements are consumed for a variety of reasons, including for their purported antihypertensive, antibacterial, and anticarcinogenic effects. The steady increase in the global herbal dietary supplement market paired with a global patchwork of regulatory frameworks makes the development of assays for authentication of these products increasingly important. A DNA mini-barcode assay was developed using the P6 loop of the plastid intron to positively identify products. Analysis of 43 commercially available garlic herbal dietary supplements produced mini-barcode sequences for 33 supplements, all of which contained detectable amounts of . The P6 mini-barcode can be highly useful for specimen identification, particularly for samples that may contain degraded DNA.