Determining Phylogenetic Relationships of Some Endemic and Rare Astragalus Taxa in the Van Lake Basin

Abstract

Astragalus, the most diverse genus in the world, contains about 3000 different taxa. This genus has 489 taxa and 63 sections in Turkey, giving it a 51% endemism rate. 82 Astragalus taxa were collected from the Van Lake Basin in 2019 for this research. These species' morphological diagnoses revealed that four of them were rare and 17 of them were endemic. In this research, the universal primers ITS4 and ITS5 were used to amplify the ITS1 and ITS2 sections, which included the 5.8S gene of rDNA. Different programs (SnapGene, CLC DNA Workbench) were used to analyze the genome information of species in the genus Astragalus. The DNA sequences of Astragalus species have been uploaded to the GenBank database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) (Maryland, USA), which is open to all researchers worldwide. The length of the ITS in the study, including the 5.8S sequence, varied from 669 to 687 bp. The results showed that the phylogenetic tree combined with the most stable secondary (20) structure obtained from the universal ITS4 and ITS5 primers is an effective tool for the identification of Astragalus taxa.