THE IMPORTANCE OF trnL/trnF IGS REGION IN THE TAXONOMY OF THE GENUS POTENTILLA L.

Abstract

This study was performed in order to determine the phylogenetic relationships in the genus Potentilla and to assess the importance of the trnL/trnF IGS region. The selection of DNA barcoding region to provide for more effective, accurate and consistent results in the analysis is one of the most important points in successful of the study. It can be stated as a result of this study that trnL/trnF IGS region has the convenient sequence length for barcoding region, also it is proposed the using of this region with which has high variable and parsimony informative sites observed in 133 and 91 nucleotides, respectively. When the probabilities of substitutions from one base to another base for trnL/trnF IGS region were examined, it was assigned that the rate of transitional substitutions with 57.13 % is higher than the transversional substitutions. MP dendrogram which was drawn to evaluate the taxonomy of the genus Potentilla and phylogenetic relationships among taxa separated the taxa examined in six groups as Fragarioides, Reptans, Anserina, Alba, Himalayan and Argentea. Phylogenetic relationships within the Argentea clade represented by the highest species number in this study was observed as quite confused in comparison to other clades. As a result, it can be stated that many evolutionary mechanisms have effects on the genus and in order to get the most accurate results firstly it is necessary to determine the regions giving the best results, then to use these regions determined together with as many taxa as possible.