Identificación molecular de especies del género Restrepia (Orchidaceae), colectadas en Centro y Sudamérica, mediante el sistema DNA BARCODE

Abstract

The genus Restrepia is distinguished from other genera of the Orchidaceae family by the attenuation of the dorsal sepal and the arrangement of osmophores in its structure. There are 61 species of Restrepia, distributed throughout Central and South America, from Guatemala to Bolivia through countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. The identification of the species of this genus is very complicated because they have very similar morphological characteristics, and there is no complete classification of all the species described so far. In this work, plant samples of the genus Restrepia collected previously on different locations in Central and South America, were processed by first obtaining their DNA using the modified Doyle & Doyle method. Afterwards they were amplified with the molecular markers rpoC1 and matK by conventional PCR with the Platinum™ Direct PCR Universal Master Mix kit, and phylogenetic trees were elaborated with the resulting sequences using the Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood methods, with the evolutionary models (JC) and (T92) respectively. In addition, a georeferencing of the samples from the countries of Central and South America was carried out, demonstrating a significant presence of species of the genus Restrepia throughout the region, especially in Colombia. After the investigation carried out, it was determined that the matK marker is not suitable for the identification of species of the genus Restrepia because it is a highly conserved region, while rpoC1 is not discriminative enough, for which reason it was not possible to obtain enough information to make an adequate identification of species of this genus.