Meise Botanic Garden, Meise, Belgium.
Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2023 Apr 20;18(4):e0284732. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284732. eCollection 2023.
In the last decades, illegal logging has posed a serious threat for the integrity of forest ecosystems and for biodiversity conservation in tropical Africa. Although international treaties and regulatory plans have been implemented to reduce illegal logging, much of the total timber volume is harvested and traded illegally from tropical African forest regions. As a result, the development and the application of analytical tools to enhance the traceability and the identification of wood and related products is critical to enforce international regulations. Among available techniques, DNA barcoding is a promising approach for the molecular identification of plant species. However, although it has been used successfully for the discrimination of animal species, no set of genetic markers is available for the universal identification of plant species. In this work, we firstly characterized the genetic diversity of 17 highly-valuable African timber species from five genera (Afzelia, Guibourtia, Leplea, Milicia, Tieghemella) across their distribution ranges in West and Central Africa using the genome skimming approach in order to reconstruct their chloroplast genomes and nuclear ribosomal DNA. Next, we identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for the discrimination of closely-related species. In this way, we successfully developed and tested novel species-specific genetic barcodes for species identification.
在过去几十年中，非法采伐对森林生态系统的完整性和热带非洲的生物多样性保护构成了严重威胁。尽管已经实施了国际条约和监管计划来减少非法采伐，但大部分木材总量仍从热带非洲森林地区非法采伐和交易。因此，开发和应用分析工具来提高木材和相关产品的可追溯性和识别能力对于执行国际法规至关重要。在可用的技术中，DNA 条形码是植物物种分子鉴定的一种很有前途的方法。然而，尽管它已成功用于动物物种的区分，但没有一套遗传标记可用于普遍识别植物物种。在这项工作中，我们首先使用基因组扫描方法在其分布范围内对来自五个属（Afzelia、Guibourtia、Leplea、Milicia、Tieghemella）的 17 种具有高度价值的非洲木材物种进行了遗传多样性特征分析，以重建它们的叶绿体基因组和核核糖体 DNA。接下来，我们确定了用于区分密切相关物种的单核苷酸多态性 (SNP)。通过这种方式，我们成功地为物种鉴定开发和测试了新的种特异性遗传条形码。
