Phylogenetic Analysis: An Auxiliary Tool For The Study Of Molecular Identification Of Plants

This work aims to validate the phylogenetic analysis as a tool in themolecular identification of plants to prevent potential health risks from theinappropriate and unsupervised use of medicinal plants. The methodology used involves creating a private, manually curated database to identify herbs by building a phylogenetic tree using the maximum likelihood method. Seven commonly marketed medicinal plants and others with similar phenotypic and genetic characteristics were selected and researched, whether or not they belonged to the same genus as those used as a reference. In total, the tree showed 29 different genera.