Abstract:
Pakistan hosts rich biodiversity of flora which covers conifer forests to the marsh lands. Pakistan and Kashmir has been reported home for more than 6000 flowering plant species. The vegetation is even richer in sino-himaliyan species. Out of 105 Genera and 5000 families, Pakistan is a home for 22 Genera and 179 species of Cyperaceae. Commonly known as sedges, they are known for their weedy nature in wild and fields, they are found near all type of wetland dominated areas like marshes, fens, bogs, polluted areas and banks of canals. It is because of its huge number of species that it is difficult to identify species on the bases of morphological and diagnostic characters. A few species holds similar morphologically identity that they can’t be differentiated unless studied with deep concentration. It was found that some of these species had their ITS sequenced but some were not reported. Different species from family Cyperaceae were collected from the wetlands residing Margalla hills Islamabad. These species were then analyzed and were morphologically diagnosed at first. The markers for molecular identification used are ITS region (ITS1f and ITS4r) which were then BLAST and aligned to the ten close relatives. Due to the presence of polyploidy the results suggests that these gene copies could be transferred from neighboring plant species from the same family but different genus. They were edited manually where necessary. This research also has revealed that family genus Cyperus, Actinoscirpus and Pycreus are polyphyletic in origin. It has also been inferred that they contain double gene copy or different anomalies which can be seen as mutations but close analysis of the sequences and chromatogram revealed the nature of the sequence and proposed the results. The trees of these species are constructed individually on the bases of neighbor joining method with a bootstrap value of 100.
