Abstract
Bupleurum falcatum, which belongs to the family Apiaceae, has long been applied for curative treatments, especially as a liver tonic, in herbal medicine. The chloroplast (cp) genome has been an ideal model to perform the evolutionary and comparative studies because of its highly conserved features and simple structure. The Apiaceae family is taxonomically close to the Araliaceae family and there have been numerous complete chloroplast genome sequences reported in the Araliaceae family, while little is known about the Apiaceae family. In this study, the complete sequence of the B. falcatum chloroplast genome was obtained. The full-length of the cp genome is 155,989 nucleotides with a 37.66% overall guanine-cytosine (GC) content and shows a quadripartite structure composed of three nomenclatural regions: a large single-copy (LSC) region, a small single-copy (SSC) region, and a pair of inverted repeat (IR) regions. The genome occupancy is 85,912-bp, 17,517-bp, and 26,280-bp for LSC, SSC, and IR, respectively. B. falcatum was shown to contain 111 unique genes (78 for protein-coding, 29 for tRNAs, and four for rRNAs, respectively) on its chloroplast genome. Genic comparison found that B. falcatum has no pseudogenes and has two gene losses, accD in the LSC and ycf15 in the IRs. A total of 55 unique tandem repeat sequences were detected in the B. falcatum cp genome. This report is the first to describe the complete chloroplast genome sequence in B. falcatum and will open up further avenues of research to understand the evolutionary panorama and the chloroplast genome conformation in related plant species.
Highlights
Chloroplasts, called cp or ct, are distinctly important organelles which have their own genomes and play pivotal roles in generating energy through photosynthesis, fixing carbon, and biosynthesizing starch, fatty acids, pigments, and amino acids in plant cells [1,2]
The assembled B. falcatum cp genome showed a high similarity to the reference sequence, Panax ginseng Chunpoong (GenBank Accession#: KM088019) and extended its size to 155,989 nucleotides long (Figure 1)
The B. falcatum cp genome contains a total of 111 unique genes constituting 78 protein-coding genes, 29 transfer RNAs, and four ribosomal RNAs with the overall AT content of 62.34% (Table 1)
Summary
Chloroplasts, called cp or ct, are distinctly important organelles which have their own genomes and play pivotal roles in generating energy through photosynthesis, fixing carbon, and biosynthesizing starch, fatty acids, pigments, and amino acids in plant cells [1,2]. They have been used as ideal research models, for evolutionary and comparative genomic studies because of their highly conserved gene content, relatively small size, and simple structure. The complete chloroplast genome of a flowering plant, Bupleurum falcatum, which is categorized to the family Apiaceae, was investigated.
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