Forensic identification of plant species using RBCL markers

Introduction: Identification of toxic plants is an occasional task in forensic and medico-legal investigations. In case of intact form of plant, the morphological characterization could be helpful enough for the identification but authentic species level identification of such plants requires molecular level identification. In the absence of physical markers (where material is macerated), the molecular techniques become very useful for the identification of plants up to species level.

Materials, Methods and Results: The research work has identified three plant species viz. Nerium oleander, Cassia fistula, and Ricinus communis by using ribulose-bisphosphate carboxylase (rbcL) regions of DNA because of its merits in combination with trnH-psbA regions. Species were confirmed using BLASTn analysis and phylogenetic inference based on the Maximum Likelihood and Neighbour-Joining method for the rbcL gene. Sequences were submitted to NCBI, and accession numbers were obtained for all three plants.