Abstract:
Economically important representatives of the Artemisia genus have wide application in pharmaceutics, landscape architecture and agriculture. The aim of this study was to phylogenetically analyse the 18S-26S rDNA, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) nucleotide sequences of 19 Artemisia samples collected from Ordu Province of Turkey. Analyses were conducted using neighbour-joining (NJ), maximum-parsimony (MP) and maximum-likelihood (ML) algorithms. Our analysis revealed two unique haplotypes within our samples, including a rare one (Haplotype-I, represented by a single sample) and a common one (Haplotype-II, represented by 18 samples). In all trees, both of our haplotypes appeared in the same lineage with Artemisia sylvatica, Artemisia argyi and Artemisia verlotiorum. Although rDNA-ITS is known to be a variative marker, oddly it was highly conserved in Artemisia, which is why we used this marker to determine the phylogenetic affiliation of the analysed plants.