editor@ijphdt.com
9343055451
e-ISSN: 3049-1630
logo

International Journal of Pharmacognosy and Herbal Drug Technology

LoginTrack
Published

Authentication of Herbal Samples of Indian Medicinal Plants in Trade using DNA Barcoding

Akanksha Priya
doi_icon
10.64063/3049-1630.vol3.issue4.000233

Published in IJPHDT, Vol-3, Issue-04, April-2026 (Vol. 3, Issue 4, 2026)

Authentication of Herbal Samples of Indian Medicinal Plants in Trade using DNA Barcoding - Issue cover

Keywords

HerbalsMedicinal PlantsDNA BarcodingAdulteration

Abstract

Medicinal plants are the prime source of herbal materials, with 1178 species traded in India and 242 having high trade volumes. Most of the medicinal plants are collected from the wild indiscriminately, as very few of these plants are cultivated, leading to overexploitation and decline of species. Scarcity of these often results in adulteration and substitution, making traditional identification difficult. DNA barcoding has proved to be an accurate and reliable alternative for identification of such herbals but before being used for this purpose, species-specific barcodes for the species of interest should be available. The barcode library developed was used for authenticating the botanical identities of 163 herbal samples, procured from different markets or online, supposed to be belonging to 54 species, including 41 species of high trade volume by phylogenetic tree (NJ) method and BLAST1 analysis. Herbal samples (147) of 54 species could be tested and 92 (62.6%) of the tested samples were found to be authentic by using any of the four barcode loci. Of these, number of samples identified by ITS2 (69) was the highest, followed by rbcL (51), matK (26) and ITS (17) individually. BLAST1 search of the sequences of the samples not found to be authentic revealed that some of the herbal samples were substituted following the ayurvedic principle “Abhava Pratinidhi Dravyas” with their known substitutes or other unrelated medicinal plants, while few by totally unrelated plant species, such as, ‘Besan’ (Cicer arietinum) in place of ‘Vachhnag’ (Aconitum ferox) and an obnoxious weed, Parthenium hysterophorus substituting for ‘Pashanbheda’ (Bergenia ligulata).

References

  1. [1]1. Altschul SF, Gish W, Miller W, Myers EW, Lipman DJ. Basic local alignment search tool. J Mol Biol 215: 403–410.
  2. [2]2. Amin H, Chayal V. DNA barcoding for Ayurveda plants: insistent requirement for the discipline. J Ayurvedic Herb Med 11(1): 3–6.
  3. [3]3. Narayana DBA, Johnson ST. DNA barcoding in authentication of herbal raw materials, extracts and dietary supplements: a perspective. Plant Biotechnol Rep 13: 201–210.
  4. [4]4. Balachandran KRS, Mohanasundaram S, Ramalingam S. DNA barcoding: a genomic-based tool for authentication of phytomedicinals and its products. Botanics: Targets Ther 5: 77–84.
  5. [5]5. Barnwell P, Blanchard AN, Bryant JA, Smirnoff N, Weir A. Isolation of DNA from the highly mucilaginous succulent plant Sedum telephium. Plant Mol Biol Rep 16: 133–138.
  6. [6]6. Basu R, Dasgupta S, Babu SN, Noor A. Medicinal plants in the Indian traditional medicine and current practices. In: Arunachalam K et al. (eds) Bioprospecting of Tropical Medicinal Plants. Springer, Cham.
  7. [7]7. Chase MW, Cowan RS, Hollingsworth PM, Van den Berg C, Madrinan S, Petersen GA. Proposal for a standardized protocol to barcode all land plants. Taxon 56: 295–299.
  8. [8]8. Chen S, Yao H, Han J, Liu C, Song J, Shi L, Zhu Y, Ma X, Gao T, Pang X, Luo K, Li Y, Li X, Jia X, Lin Y, Leon C. Validation of the ITS2 region as a novel DNA barcode for identifying medicinal plant species. PLoS ONE 5: e8613.
  9. [9]9. Fabricant DS, Farnsworth NR. The value of plants used in traditional medicine for drug discovery. Environ Health Perspect 109: 69–75.
  10. [10]10. Fay MF, Swensen SM, Chase MW. Taxonomic affinities of Medusagyne oppositifolia. Kew Bull 52: 111–120.
  11. [11]11. Fazekas AJ, Burgess KS, Kesanakurti PR, Graham SW, Newmaster SG, Husband BC, Percy DM, Hajibabaei M, Barrett SCH. Multiple multilocus DNA barcodes from the plastid genome discriminate plant species equally well. PLoS ONE 3: e2802.
  12. [12]12. Ghorbani A, Saeedi Y, de Boer HJ. Unidentifiable by morphology: DNA barcoding of plant material in local markets in Iran. PLoS ONE 12: e0175722.
  13. [13]13. Guo M, Ren L, Pang X. Inspecting the true identity of herbal materials from Cynanchum using ITS2 barcode. Front Plant Sci 8: 1945.
  14. [14]14. Hebert PDN, Cywinska A, Ball SL, de Waard JR. Biological identifications through DNA barcodes. Proc R Soc B 270: 313–321.
  15. [15]15. Hebert PDN, Ratnasingham S, de Waard JR. Barcoding animal life: cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 divergences among closely related species. Proc R Soc B 270: S96–S99.
  16. [16]16. Hollingsworth PM, Forrest LL, Spouge JL, Hajibabaei M, Ratnasingham S, Chase MW. A DNA barcode for land plants. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106: 12794–12797.
  17. [17]17. Ichim MC, Häser A, Nick P. Microscopic authentication of commercial herbal products in the globalized market: potential and limitations. Front Pharmacol 11: 876.
  18. [18]18. Keller A, Schleicher T, Schultz J, Muller T, Dandekar T, Wolf M. 5.8S–28S rRNA interaction and HMM-based ITS2 annotation. Gene 430: 50–57.
  19. [19]19. Kool A, de Boer HJ, Kruger A, Rydberg A, Abbad A, Bjork L, Martin G. Molecular identification of commercialized medicinal plants in Southern Morocco. PLoS ONE 7: e39459.
  20. [20]20. Kress WJ, Erickson DL. A two-locus global DNA barcode for land plants. PLoS ONE 2: e508.
  21. [21]21. Kress WJ, Erickson DL. DNA barcodes: methods and protocols. Methods Mol Biol 858: 3–8.
  22. [22]22. Kumar S, Stecher G, Tamura K. MEGA7: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis version 7.0. Mol Biol Evol 33: 1870–1874.
  23. [23]23. Liu Y, Xu C, Sun Y, Chen X, Dong W, Yang X, Zhou S. Method for quick DNA barcode reference library construction. Ecol Evol 11: 11627–11638.
  24. [24]24. Liu ZF, Ci XQ, Li L, Li HW, Conran JG, Li J. DNA barcoding evaluation in Lauraceae from China. PLoS ONE 12: e0175788.
  25. [25]25. Marichamy K, Kumar NY, Ganesan A. Sustainable development in exports of herbals and AYUSH in India. Sci Park Res J 1.
  26. [26]26. Mishra P, Kumar A, Nagireddy A, Mani DN, Shukla AK, Tiwari R, Sundaresan V. DNA barcoding: an efficient tool to overcome authentication challenges in the herbal market. Plant Biotechnol J 14: 8–21.
  27. [27]27. Newmaster SG, Grguric M, Shanmughanandhan D, Ramalingam S, Ragupathy S. DNA barcoding detects contamination in herbal products. BMC Med 11: 222.
  28. [28]28. Olmstead RG, Michaels HJ, Scott KM, Palmer JD. Monophyly of the Asteridae inferred from rbcL sequences. Ann Missouri Bot Gard 79: 249–265.
  29. [29]29. Pang X, Song J, Zhu Y, Xie C, Chen S. Using DNA barcoding to identify species within Euphorbiaceae. Planta Med 76: 1784–1786.
  30. [30]30. Parveen I, Gafner S, Techen N, Murch SJ, Khan IA. DNA barcoding for identification of botanicals. Planta Med.
  31. [31]31. Priya AP, Malik S, Babbar SB. In silico development of DNA barcodes of Indian medicinal plants. Medicinal Plants 10(4): 285.
  32. [32]32. Ratnasingham S, Hebert PDN. BOLD: the barcode of life data system. Mol Ecol Notes 7: 355–364.
  33. [33]33. Ross HA, Murugan S, Li WL. Testing the reliability of genetic methods of species identification. Syst Biol 57: 216–230.
  34. [34]34. Saitou N, Nei M. The neighbor-joining method. Mol Biol Evol 4: 406–425.
  35. [35]35. Schindel DE, Miller SE. DNA barcoding: a useful tool for taxonomists. Nature 435: 17.
  36. [36]36. Sharma KK, Sharma LK, Kumar S. A common, cure and curative study of traditional plants used in COVID-19. Int J Multidiscip Res 7(1): 1–6.
  37. [37]37. Singh PA, Dash S, Choudhury A et al. Factors affecting long-term availability of medicinal plants in India. J Crop Sci Biotechnol 27: 145–173.
  38. [38]38. Uniyal SK, Awasthi A, Rawat GS. Traditional and ethnobotanical uses of plants in Bhagirathi valley. Indian J Tradit Know 1: 7–19.
  39. [39]39. Urumarudappa SKJ, Tungphatthong C, Jaipaew J et al. Development of a DNA barcode library of plants in the Thai Herbal Pharmacopoeia. Sci Rep 12: 9624.
  40. [40]40. Vassou SL, Nithaniyal S, Raju B, Parani M. Creation of reference DNA barcode library for Ayurvedic medicine. BMC Complement Altern Med 16: 186.
  41. [41]41. White TJ, Bruns T, Lee S, Taylor JW. Amplification and sequencing of fungal rRNA genes. In: PCR Protocols.
  42. [42]42. Yang S, Chen S, Mo J, Liu J, Pan Q, Song C. Application of DNA Barcoding to Identify Medicinal Plants. J Vis Exp 1;(213). doi: 10.3791/66925.
  43. [43]43. Zhang J, Chen M, Dong X, Lin R, Fan J, Chen Z. Evaluation of DNA barcoding loci for Chinese medicinal plants. PLoS ONE 10: e0125574.

Authors (1)

Akanksha Priya

Department of Botany, College ...

View all publications →

Download Article

PDF

Best for printing and citation

File size: 1.9 MB
Format: PDF

Download Article

PDF

Best for printing and citation

File size: 1.9 MB
Format: PDF

Article Information

Published in:

IJPHDT, Vol-3, Issue-04, April-2026 (Vol. 3, Issue 4, 2026)

IJPHDT430001

IJPHDT-01-000233

1-15

2026-04-20

Article Impact

Views:5,443
Downloads:1,097
scite_
PlumX Metrics Badge

How to Cite

Priya (2026). Authentication of Herbal Samples of Indian Medicinal Plants in Trade using DNA Barcoding. International Journal of Pharmacognosy and Herbal Drug Technology, 3(4), 1-15. DOI:https://doi.org/10.64063/3049-1630.vol3.issue4.000233

Article Actions

Whatsapp