DNA barcoding of crop plants

This chapter deals with the importance of generating barcodes of life, aimed at the conservation of the diversity of crop species, providing an overview of the creation of this tool, its applications, the markers proposed for its study, among that highlight a list of chloroplast genes, which have been chosen due to their characteristics of presenting sufficient variation to discriminate among species. It is addressed in the same way, as this tool is used for the study of crop plants, such as wheat or rice, crops of great consumption worldwide and that present different levels of ploidy, which can be differentiated by combining more than one region barcode. The process of identification and genetic differentiation among plants would not be possible, if they had not previously been identified morphologically, so herborization traditionally plays a fundamental role in the generation of barcode in plants.