Pollen grains taxonomy matches DNA-barcoding taxonomy in discrimination between some convolvulaceae taxa

Palynological investigation relays on morphology and seed coat characters. It's a well-known approach to be used in discrimination between related plants. While the DNS barcoding used specific regions in the plant genome to identify the plant species/sub-species. Here, we compared pollen grain taxonomy and DNA barcoding taxonomy of 12 taxa belonging to the Convolvulaceae family growing in Egypt. The pollen grains were examined by the scanning electron microscope (SEM) then their features were recorded in a data matrix to compare their characters and create a phylogenetic tree. The gene sequences of the MatK gene, that is wildly used in the DNA barcoding, of the same 12 plants were compared to build another phylogenetic tree based on the sequence similarity between the gene sequences. Our results show high similarity between the two phylogenetic trees indicating the high efficiency of the pollen grain taxonomy and a promising integration of micro-morphological approaches and molecular approaches in discrimination between plants.