Raising the bar - Molecular identification of plants

Up to a third of biodiversity is threatened due to the global economy and its international supply chains. The lack of global assessments of international supply chains and appropriate methods for the tractability of the traded products complicate the evaluation of the international trade’s impact on biodiversity loss. The goal of this thesis is, first, to explore new tech- nologies for traditional barcoding and metabarcoding, and then to develop alternative approaches to achieve better resolu- tion for the identification of species. Paper I shows illegal plant trade of orchids using standard barcoding markers and distance-based methods to identify traded species. These tools are also used in Paper II, which aims to identify adulteration and substitution of Hypericum perforatum L. herbal supplements. Paper III focuses on ginseng. This paper uses species delimitation approaches based on the phylogenomics of plastid genomes for the identification of ginseng species. Paper IV presents the evolution of Anacyclus and tests for hybridization using hundreds of nuclear genes. Then, in Paper V, traded market samples are used to understand the supply chain of Anacyclus pyrethrum