Revisión de las especies latinoamericanas de orquídeas del género Dracula mediante la técnica molecular barcode

Abstract

The genus Dracula, belongs to the family Orchidaceae, the morphology of his flowers has made it easily distinguishable from another genus of Neotropical orchids and is one of the species mostly pollinated by Diptera. Around 130 species of Dracula have been described, distributed from southeastern Mexico to northern Peru. For the study, 176 individuals of Dracula were collected in orchid orchards of the provinces of Azuay and Pichincha. DNA was extracted by the modified Doyle & Doyle method, by means of the conventional PCR technique the segments of the matK region and the ITS intergenic spacer were amplified with the use of the Phire Plant Direct PCR Master Mix kit, the products were sequenced using the Sanger method and studied with Boldsystems and Blast bioinformatics tools to verify the identity of the species, two trees were made one per region with the Maximum Likelihood technique and the Tamura-Nei model of the Mega 7 software. The obtained phylogenetic results indicate that the matK region presented a greater interspecies variability, while the ITS region proved not to be discriminative to differentiate the subgeneric classification of the genus Dracula, besides it allowed to propose a change in the classification of the classical systematics given by Luer (1993), the biogeographical analysis proposes that Carchi in Ecuador and the Putumayo Eastern Cordillera in Colombia, are the areas with the highest density of the genus.