Background and Rationale |
The Herbarium CryptogamaeIndiaeOrientalis (HCIO), a National herbarium established in 1905, not only
serves as an educational resource for the National Agricultural Research System (NARS), but also conserves fungal biodiversity.
At present, HCIO is enriched with about 50,000 specimens with Type Specimens (3800), New species recorded (570), New Indian Genera recorded (19), Indian Exsiccati sets (18) and Foreign Exsiccati sets (188). The Indian Type Culture Collection (ITCC), a National repository of fungal cultures (about 4000), was established in 1936 consists of Ascomycetes (1005), Basidiomycetes (495), Mastigomycetes (25), Zygomycetes (390), Hyphomycetes (1565), Coelomycetes (362), which includes plant pathogens, biocontrol agents, fungi for medical and industrial use including mushroom and yeast. There is a need to conserve the fungal biodiversity available with HCIO and ITCC by documenting through digitization and DNA barcoding respectively.
Virtual Herbarium can become an online resource through digitization. It provides dynamic access to the wealth of fungal specimen
data. Many herbaria viz. Australia’s virtual herbarium, National Herbarium Netherland, New Zealand virtual herbarium and United
State virtual herbarium are providing on-line access to data originating from their collections. Digitization of herbarium specimens with HCIO will help a wide range of stakeholders, including Students and researchers.
DNA barcoding is aimed at developing a ‘biological barcode’ to enable identification of any organism at the species level.
DNA barcoding has been promoted as a potentially powerful method for the efficient, accurate and high throughput assignment
of unknown specimens to known species. Reference barcodes must be derived from expertly identified vouchers
deposited in biological collections. Interspecific variation should exceed intraspecific variation (the barcode gap),
and barcoding is optimal when a sequence is constant and unique to one species (Hebert
et al. 2003).
Ideally, the barcode locus would be the same for all kingdoms. The cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (CO1; Universal barcode
for animals) is more reliable in a few clades of closely related fungal species (Robideau
et al. 2011) but not all. Due
to presence of large database and universal primers, ITS is proposed as the standard barcode (Schoch
et al. 2012). This
proposal will be applicable for many fungal genera but not for fungi which are having species complexes (eg. Fusarium,
Colletotrichumand Cercospora). For the fungi having low ITS interspecific variability, secondary markers must be used to
accurately report genetic diversity. Therefore, DNA barcode will be developed for important genera available at ITCC (Table 1)
after identifying suitable DNA barcode regions.
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