Although Opuntia species are of high agronomic value in Korea, the taxonomic position of Korean Opuntia species has never been investigated. The taxonomic position of Korean Opuntia spp. within the tribe Opuntieae was examined based on DNA sequence analysis of matK, trnL-F, atpB-rbcl, and ITS regions. | Turkish Journal of Botany Research Article Turk J Bot (2015) 39: 635-641 © TÜBİTAK doi: Phylogeny of Korean Opuntia spp. based on multiple DNA regions Krishnamoorthy SRIKANTH, Sung Soo WHANG* Division of Science Education, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea Received: Accepted/Published Online: Printed: Abstract: Although Opuntia species are of high agronomic value in Korea, the taxonomic position of Korean Opuntia species has never been investigated. The taxonomic position of Korean Opuntia spp. within the tribe Opuntieae was examined based on DNA sequence analysis of matK, trnL-F, atpB-rbcl, and ITS regions. The total amplified sequence length was 2977 bp; only 18 parsimonious informative sites were present, even though they belonged to different species. A phylogenetic tree using both the maximum likelihood method with 2000 bootstrap replications and Bayesian posterior probabilities was constructed. The new forma, Opuntia humifusa f. jeollaensis, used in this study was placed within the Macrocentra clade rather than the Humifusa clade. The genetic distance between O. humifusa f. jeollaenis and O. camanchica was the lowest among all Opuntia spp. analyzed in this study. Korean O. ficus-indica was genetically closer to O. engelmannii than to O. ficus-indica previously reported. Opuntia engelmannii and O. ficus-indica have been considered conspecific previously, and so it is likely that the Korean O. ficus-indica used in this study may be a relative of O. engelmannii or may have arisen from a lineage different to the O. ficus-indica used in the analysis. Key words: Korean Opuntia, phylogeny, matK, trnL-F, atpB-rbcL, ITS region 1. Introduction Cactaceae comprises between 1438 (Hunt, 2006) and 1850 (Nyeffler and Eggli, 2010) species. Opuntioideae is a subfamily of Cactaceae; Opuntia is one of the largest genera, with around 180 to 200 species .
