Format: ORAL

Alexandra Crum1, Sophie Naylor2, Annika Smeenk1, Adiel J. Andino-Acevedo3, Zack Radford4, Natalie Hoidal5, Zongxee Lee, Mayyia Lee, Ya Yang1

1 Plant & Microbial Biology Department, University of Minnesota -Twin Cities, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA 2 Geology Department, Colgate University, Middletown, Connecticut, USA 3 Agricultural Technology, University of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, USA 4 Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 5 Minnesota Extension, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, St. Paul, Minnesota USA

The Hmong people are an ethnic group that primarily live in China and Laos[YY1]. However, post-Vietnam War, many Hmong were forced to leave Laos as refugees, with a large portion settling in the U.S. Today, one of the largest communities of Hmong in America is in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. In traditional Hmong culture, to recover from giving birth a new mother will follow a strict diet of chicken soup with medicinal herbs for 30 days postpartum. In the Hmong diaspora, some Hmong women brought these herbs with them and began growing them in their new homes, including Mayyia Thao Lee. Now an organic farmer outside St. Paul, MN, she and her daughters, Mhonpaj and Zongxee, sell postpartum herbs to regional hospitals for culturally relevant care. While they have extensive knowledge of the plants Hmong names and uses, the scientific names are either unknown or tentative. Noticing that many younger generations of Hmong are either skeptical or lacking knowledge about the herbs, Mayyia and Zongxee requested help assigning Latin names to their soup herbs, so they could continue selling to hospitals and preserve their knowledge. Complicating species identification, many of them do not flower outside of tropical/montane Asia, and keys for this area are limited. Given these challenges, DNA barcoding is the best option for assigning scientific names. To identify these medicinal herbs, we sequenced the ITS and rbcL loci of these herbs, BLASTed them against NCBI GenBank, and inferred the phylogeny of our sequences and their close matches from GenBank. Taxonomic issues and limited publicly available sequences in some taxonomic groups complicated species identification for several of the plants. However, we were able to barcode 45 Hmong medicinal herbs, with 29 identified to species, 14 to genus, and 2 to family.