Abstract
Magnolia zenii is a critically endangered species known from only 18 trees that survive on Baohua Mountain in Jiangsu province, China. Little information is available regarding its molecular biology, with no genomic study performed on M. zenii until now. We determined the complete plastid genome of M. zenii and identified microsatellites. Whole sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis using BI and ML methods were also conducted. The plastome of M. zenii was 160,048 bp long with 39.2% GC content and included a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) of 26,596 bp that separated a large single-copy (LSC) region of 88,098 bp and a small single-copy (SSC) region of 18,757 bp. One hundred thirty genes were identified, of which 79 were protein-coding genes, 37 were transfer RNAs, and eight were ribosomal RNAs. Thirty seven simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were also identified. Comparative analyses of genome structure and sequence data of closely-related species revealed five mutation hotspots, useful for future phylogenetic research. Magnolia zenii was placed as sister to M. biondii with strong support in all analyses. Overall, this study providing M. zenii genomic resources will be beneficial for the evolutionary study and phylogenetic reconstruction of Magnoliaceae.
Highlights
Species due to there being only one population of 18 individuals existing on the northern slopes of the Baohua Mountain in Jiangsu, China
The plastid structure of M. zenii was a typical quadripartite circular molecule (Figure 1) that resembles the plastomes of the majority of angiosperms, which includes a large single-copy (LSC) region of 88,098 bp and a short single-copy (SSC) region of 18,757 bp divided into a pair of inverted repeat (IR) regions, IRA (26,596 bp) and IRB (26,596 bp)
We found that mononucleotide, dinucleotide, and trinucleotide repeats were composed of a higher level of A or T; this contributed to a bias in base composition, which was consistent with the overall A-T richness (60.7%) of the plastome
Summary
Species (www.iucnredlist.org) due to there being only one population of 18 individuals existing on the northern slopes of the Baohua Mountain in Jiangsu, China. The small population of M. zenii is found within a provincial reserve, but no specific protective measures are given to this species. The survival of the species remains highly uncertain, with no natural regeneration being observed and no information available regarding seed viability. Current research on the conservation of the species has focused on intra- and inter-specific competition [1,2], vegetative propagation [3], and endogenous hormone production [4,5]. The species has great potential as an ornamental tree due to being early flowering
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