Plant Diversity on Lombok Island, Indonesia : An Approach at Identification Using DNA Barcodes

Abstract

Plant diversity is poorly known on most tropical Asian islands, where many native species are under threat due to the rapid increase in non-indigenous plants. We conducted fieldwork to survey plant diversity on Lombok Island, Indonesia, an island where floral diversity has been poorly documented. Among the more than 800 angiosperm collections, 492 leaf fragments preserved for molecular analyses were identified using rbcL sequences as barcodes. Using Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) searches against the entire DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) data sets yielded 314 haplotypes and 289 species in 265 genera and 87 families, determined by 96-100% sequence identity. While only 27 (8.6%) of the collections showed 100% sequence identity, the remainder (91.4%) exhibited less than 99% sequence identity. Those collections likely represent described or undescribed species, whose rbcL sequences have not yet been investigated. Since at least one species in every collection had a high similarity in the rbcL sequence, this method of species identification is of great use as a fast approach for surveying and analyzing largely unexplored tropical island floras.