Taxonomic Studies on Family Lauraceae and Its Antibacterial Effect

Abstract

Lauraceae (the laurel or avocado family) is an economically important family. Eight taxa (representing three tribes, four genera and seven species) of Lauraceae grown in Egypt were studied. This study was carried out to study the taxonomic relationships of this family and to explore the contribution of morphology, molecular and chemical screening in systematics of Lauraceae. The macro-micromorphological patterns, inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) analysis, as well as chemical composition of essential oils and their antibacterial activity were used. The macro-micromorphological patterns were investigated by light microscope. The genetic differentiation among the studied taxa was analyzed by a genotyping method using 13 ISSR primers. The essential oils were extracted by Clevenger apparatus and analyzed by Gas-chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The antibacterial activity was determined by Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC).The recorded data were analyzed using the Dice coefficient to compute the similarity matrix. This similarity matrix was used