Abstract
Senecio asirensis Boulos & J.R.I. Wood (family: Asteraceae) is an endemic plant of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia found at a few places. The medicinal value of this plant is due to the presence of a variety of complex secondary metabolites. For the development of DNA barcode for this species the chloroplast spacer sequences rps16 and psbA-trnH were found more variable and effective. Among the various loci of molecular DNA markers, nrDNA-ITS was used for the evaluation of phylogenetic relationship with other Senecio species retrieved from the GenBank database. Senecio asirensis had a separate clade from all other Senecio species suggesting its endemism to Saudi Arabia. However, using BLAST search of ITS sequence of this species on NCBI a maximum (98%) similarity to the other Senecio species was found. We analysed the data using the methods viz., maximum parsimony (MP), Neighbor-joining (NJ) and maximum likelihood for the accuracy of the results and found congruence in phylogeny for this species. Thus, based on nr-ITS marker, S. asirensis clearly showed its phylogenetic relationship to the other Senecio species.