The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) as a DNA barcode in identifying some plants from family Amaranthaceae

The molecular barcoding was used to evaluate and confirm the identification of some Amaranthaceae plants in Egypt. The ITS region was selected due to its ability to identify and classify taxa at the generic and species levels, universality, and ease of amplification and sequencing. Amaranthaceae family; the three different subfamilies Amaranthoideae, Salsoloideae, and Salicornioideae in the scope of our study belong to the family Amaranthaceae. The sequence lengths of the ITS1, 5.8S, and ITS2 regions of eight species were 462 bp, 457 bp 482 bp, 498 bp, 448 bp, 427 bp, 451 bp, and 461 bp with Aerva lanata (PP412070.1), Aerva javanica (PP412069.1), Haloxylon salicornicum (PP410311.1), Haloxylon scoparium (PP410317.1), Salicornia herbacea (PP412073.1), Salicornia europaea (PP412072.1), Sarcocornia fruticose (PP412071.1), and Sarcocornia perennis (PP410320.1), respectively. Each sequence was aligned individually at BLAST to confirm each species and determine its relation to other sequences. Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) involved 35 nucleotide sequences of nuclear (ITS region) was done using MEGA X software by Maximum Likelihood method with the highest log likelihood (-902.82) and phylogenetic relationship. The results of eight nucleotide sequences have been uploaded to the GenBank database NCBI with accession number.