Molecular Discrimination of and by InDel Markers of Chloroplast DNA.

The tuber of ( Radix in Korean) is an important medicinal herb in Korea and China; however, it is difficult to differentiate from a related medicinal herb, ( Radix in Chinese) We sought to develop a molecular method that could be used to distinguish between the tubers of and . We aligned the chloroplast genome sequences (available in the NCBI database) of the two species and identified three species-specific insertion and deletion (InDel) sites in the , , and intergenic spacer (IGS) regions. To confirm the presence of these three InDels and validate their use as markers, we designed three primer pairs to amplify the , , and IGS regions. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of the IGS region yielded a 249 bp fragment for , and 419 bp fragment for , whereas the IGS primers produced a 629 bp fragment from and a 282 bp fragment from . In the IGS region, allele fragments of 342 and 360 bp in length were amplified from , whereas 249 and 250 bp fragment were amplified from . We propose these three InDel markers as a valuable, simple, and efficient tool for identifying these medicinal herbs and will thus reduce adulteration of these herbal materials in commercial markets.