Most mix-ups happen when plants are passed from one grower to the next without good labeling, Avent says. “After a while, who’s to know whether a plant is what the label says it is?” says Pryer. Fern species are particularly hard to contain in the close quarters of a greenhouse, where their spores can drift into neighboring pots. “Ferns don’t have flowers or fruits to help with identification, like many other plants,” says lead author Kathleen Pryer, associate professor of biology at Duke University. Ferns are difficult to monitor because they’re tricky to tell apart. Most nurseries are run by growers and retailers, not taxonomists, Avent notes. “Nomenclature mix-ups in the nursery industry are frequent in all plants, ferns included,” says coauthor Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, a retail nursery that sells plants from all over the world. “Probably 50 percent of the plants I’ve collected from botanical gardens and greenhouses were incorrectly identified,” says Schuettpelz. The team’s findings appear online in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources. “It was a 100 percent match,” says study coauthor Eric Schuettpelz, a post-doctoral fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham. distans), a distant relative from Australia. When they pasted the DNA sequence of three of the plant’s genes into an online database, they discovered that what had been labeled as Wright’s lip fern ( Cheilanthes wrightii), an American native popular in rock gardens and xeriscapes, was in fact a bristle cloak fern ( C. The finding relied on a new technique called “DNA barcoding” that uses small snippets of DNA to distinguish between species, in much the same way that a supermarket scanner uses the black lines in a barcode to identify cans of soup or boxes of cereal.Ī team of North Carolina researchers suspected a fern sold in commercial nurseries might not be what the labels said it was, so they took a specimen to the lab to analyze its DNA. (Credit: iStockphoto)ĭUKE (US)-DNA testing of garden ferns sold at plant nurseries in North Carolina, Texas, and California has found that plants marketed as American natives may actually be exotic species from other parts of the globe. “Most nurseries don’t have the time or interest to find the proper nomenclature,” says Tony Avent. Ferns being sold in a garden center are often mislabeled, according to a new technique called “DNA barcoding.” A team of North Carolina researchers suspected a fern sold in commercial nurseries might not be what the labels said it was, so they took a specimen to the lab to analyze its DNA.
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