Antimicrobial potential and DNA barcoding of some Jordanian medicinal plants

Despite tremendous progress in human medicines, infectious diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites are still a major threat to public health. Nature has provided an important source of remedies to cure ailments of mankind. Most of the medicines used are from natural source, especially from plants. Plants contain hundreds or thousands of metabolites. Medicinal and aromatic plants, a gift of nature, are being used against various infections and diseases in the world since past history. Many plants are used as folk medicines to infectious diseases such as urinary tract infections, diarrhea, coetaneous abscesses, bronchitis and parasitic diseases. In present study, we obtained some medicinal plants (Triticum dicoccoides, Hordeum spontaneum, Phagnalonrupestre, Hedypnois rhagadioloides, Asphodeline lutea, Artedia squamata, Mandragora autumnalis Bertol and Alcea setosa), from different locations of Jordan to check their antimicrobial potential against various fungal and bacterial strains. Results showed that all the medicinal plants exhibited antimicrobial activity but Artedia squamata showed significant zones of inhibition 26.3mm, 28.6mm, 30.6mm and 29.3mm respectively against Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus aureus, Ganoderma lucidum and Trichoderma herzianum. Whereas, Asphodeline lutea, Artedia squamata, Mandragora autumnalis Bertol and Alcea setosa showed maximum zones of inhibition 39.6mm, 40.3mm, 42.6mm and 39mm respectively against Fusarium solani. The concept of DNA barcoding has become very popular for species level identification and is based on the species-specific variations between the short DNA sequences from a uniform locality of the genome. In 2009, CBOL Plant Working Group proposed to use defined portions of plastid gene rbcL and matK as standard DNA barcode for plants and to be supplemented with additional regions. The goal of DNA barcoding is to distinguish the majority of world species by using one or a few regions of DNA sequence and to produce a large scale reference sequence library of life on the earth. Several studies of plant DNA barcoding have generated a huge number of reference DNA barcode sequences from taxonomically authenticated species DNA barcoding was done for phylogenetic analysis and identification of medicinal plants belonging to particular species by using ITS, matK and rbcL as candidate sequences. Amplification of these regions was carried out by polymerase chain reaction and amplicons were identified by agarose gel electrophoresis followed by DNA sequencing.