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. 2019 Sep 18;4(2):3040–3041. doi: 10.1080/23802359.2019.1666050

Characterization of the complete chloroplast genome of Glycyrrhiza uralensis (Leguminosae), a traditional Chinese medicine

Guolun Jia a,b, Peng Li c, Qiang Zhu b,✉, Li Peng d
PMCID: PMC7706715  PMID: 33365846

Abstract

Glycyrrhiza uralensis is a tradational Chinese medicine of Leguminosae, which contains many chemicals, such as glycyrrhizin, liquiritin glycyrol, melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxy tryptamine), glycyrrhizol A, glycyrrhizol B and four known isoflavonoids (5-O-methylglycryol, isoglycyrol, 6,8-diisoprenyl-5,7,4′-trihydroxy isoflavone, gancaonin).

Illumina paired-end reads data was used to assemble the complete chloroplast (cp) genome. About 15,445,866 raw Paired-End Reads and the length distribution in 127,702 bp (GC content accounts for 34.3%). Eight PCG genes and six tRNA genes possess a single intron, while ycf3 has a couple of introns. Based on the concatenated coding sequences of cp PCGs, the phylogenetic analysis showed that Glycyrrhiza uralensis and Glycyrrhiza inflata (MH321931) are closely related to each other within the family Leguminosae.

Keywords: Glycyrrhiza uralensis, Leguminosae, chloroplast genome, Illumina sequencing, phylogenetic analysis

Glycyrrhiza uralensis is a traditional Chinese medicine of Leguminosae, which contains many chemicals, such as glycyrrhizin, liquiritin, glycyrol (Xie et al. 2019), melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxy tryptamine) (Afreen et al. 2006), glycyrrhizol A, glycyrrhizol B and four known isoflavonoids (5-O-methylglycryol, isoglycyrol, 6,8-diisoprenyl-5,7,4′-trihydroxy isoflavone, gancaonin) (He et al. 2006). Many reports shows that G. uralensis has multiple types of pharmaceutical efficacy, including multiple types of pharmaceutical efficacy (An et al. 2018). Glycyrrhiza polysaccharide (GCP) has inhibition effect on tumor growth (Zhang et al. 2018).

A pair of inverted repeats (IRs), separated by a large single-copy region (LSC) and a small single-copy region (SSC), these four parts, constitute a conserved structure of the complete chloroplast (cp) genome (Wolfe et al. 1992; Lee et al. 2007). This report will be very important for studying the phylogenetic relationships of Folium Sennae and Leguminosae.

The fresh leaves of G. uralensis were collected in the Ningxia Forestry Institute (38°28′N, 106°16′E; Ningxia, NW China) and deposited at Pharmacognosy laboratory in Northwest University(A voucher specimen: GU190515). The modified CTAB method was used to extract the genomic DNA (Doyle and Doyle 1987). We constructed a shotgun library with Illumina HiSeq X Ten Sequencing System (Illumina, San Diego, CA) following the manufacturer’s specification. The program MITObim v1.8 (https://github.com/chrishah/MITObim) was used to assemble cp genome (Hahn et al. 2013) and Glycyrrhiza inflata (MH321931) as the initial reference. The map of the complete cp genome was generated through the web-based tool OGDRaw v1.2 (http://ogdraw.mpimp-golm.mpg.de/) (Lohse et al. 2013) and the complete cp genome sequence has been submitted to GenBank (accession number MN199032).

The complete cp genome is a circular double-stranded DNA molecule, which with a typical quadripartite structure. We got 15,445,866 raw Paired-End Reads and the length distribution in 127,702 bp (GC content accounts for 34.3%).

The sequencing result encodes 109 complete genes, containing 75 protein-coding genes, 30 transfer RNA genes and 4 ribosomal RNA genes. In addition, 6 tRNA genes (trnA-UGC, trnG-UCC, trnI-GAU, trnK-UUU, trnL-UAA and trnV-UAC) harbor a single intron. AtpF, ndhA, ndhB, rpl2, rpl16, rpoC1, petD and petB, these 8 PCG genes possess a single intron, 66 PCG genes no intron, ycf3 harbor two introns.

Based on the concatenated coding sequences of 20 chloroplastp PCGs for 9 plastid genomes from published species of Leguminosae, we constructed a neighbour-joining (NJ) phylogenetic tree (Figure 1) using MEGA7 with 1000 bootstrap replicates (Kumar et al. 2016) (http://www.megasoftware.net/) to further study the phylogenetic position of Folium Sennae. From the NJ phylogenetic tree analysis, we find that G. uralensis and Glycyrrhiza inflata (MH321931) are closely related to each other within the family Leguminosae (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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Maximum-likelihood (ML) tree of G. uralensis and its related relatives based on the complete chloroplast genome sequences.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest, and are solely responsible for the content and writing of this paper.

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