An intentional or inadvertent mixing of plant materials containing ephedrine alkaloids, especially Ephedra , is illegal. In order to better detect plant materials containing ephedrine alkaloids in export and smuggling, DNA barcoding combined with a TaqMan real-time PCR-based assay were used in this study. We collected 201 samples from 18 species belonging to four genera distributed in three families to amplify two barcoding ma...