The Use of Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) as Marker for Rapid Identification of Dolichandrone spathacea

shape, flower color and fruit morphology. However, this method is tedious and difficult especially when some characteristics that only appear in certain season. Molecular procedure such as DNA barcoding emerged as a powerful tool to solve species problem. DNA barcoding is a molecular procedure that uses a short length of DNA sequence as a marker to identify species in question. This study is designed to sequence the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of nuclear ribosomal DNA from the leaf samples of mangrove associate tree which obtained from estuary around External Laboratory, UNIMAS at Kota Samarahan and to use ITS region as a marker for rapid species identification. Approximately between 600bp and 700bp ITS region had been sequenced from leaf samples and it matched 99% to Dolichandrone spathacea (Accession: KJ161167). Thus, it is confirmed that the tree species is D. spathacea. Both Neighbour-Joining (NJ) and Maximum Parsimony (MP) phylogenetic trees showed that D. spathacea is monophyletic, whereas other true mangrove species formed a separate clade. This study showed that ITS region is suitable to be used for rapid identification of D. spathace