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. 2019 Dec 12;5(1):248–249. doi: 10.1080/23802359.2019.1700195

The complete chloroplast genome sequence of Aconitum austroyunnanense W. T. Wang (Ranunculaceae): a medicinal plant endemic to China

Zi-Dan Cheng a, Jun He b, Ying-Min Zhang a, Cong-Wei Yang a, Xiao-Xia Ma a,✉, Guo-Dong Li a,✉
PMCID: PMC7748539  PMID: 33366507

Abstract

The complete chloroplast (cp) genome of Aconitum austroyunnanense W. T. Wang, a rare and endangered medicinal plant endemic to southwestern China, was sequenced to be 155,818 bp in length, including two inverted repeat (IR, 26,128 bp) regions, one large single-copy region (LSC) and one small single-copy region (SSC) of 86,555 bp and 17,007 bp, respectively. The cp genome has 131 annotated genes, including 85 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNA genes, 8 rRNA genes, and a pseudogene (ycf1). The overall GC content of it is 38.1%. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the cp genome of A. austroyunnanense is closely related to that of Aconitum hemsleyanum.

Keywords: Aconitum austroyunnanense, chloroplast genome, medicinal plant

Aconitum austroyunnanense W. T. Wang, a climbing perennial herb, is a medicinal and poisonous plant endemic to southwestern China, distributed only in the central-southern region of Yunnan Province (Wang 1979). The radix of A. austroyunnanense and Aconitum vilmorinianum named ‘Caowu’ are of high medicinal value and have been officially listed in Drug Standards of Yunnan Province (1998 edition) for the treatment of traumatic injury, rheumatic joint pain and chills in hands and feet (Li et al. 2017). Due to morphological similarity among Aconitum species, and molecular markers for the identification of Aconitum species are limited (He et al. 2010), it is very important to carry out phylogeny studies of Aconitum plants using chloroplast (cp) genome sequences. To date, the cp genomes of A. vilmorinianum and other 18 Aconitum species have been reported (Meng et al. 2018). Whereas, more studies on the cp genome are needed for complete molecular identification. In this study, we characterized the complete cp genome sequence of A. austroyunnanense to contribute to further molecular identification and phylogenetic position studies of this plant species.

Fresh leaves of A. austroyunnanense were collected from Gejiu Country (23°21′N, 103°11′E), Yunnan province, China and voucher specimens (5325010361) were deposited in Herbarium of Yunnan University of Chinese Medicine. Total genomic DNA was extracted using plant DNA (Bioteke Corporation, China). Genome sequencing was performed on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform (Illumina Inc., San Diego, CA). A total of 3.1 GB reads were obtained and de novo assembled using NOVOPlasty (Dierckxsens et al. 2017). The complete cp genome was annotated with the online annotation tool GeSeq (Tillich et al. 2017).

The size of the complete cp genome of A. austroyunnanense is 155,818 bp (GenBank accession No.: MN635745), containing a large single copy (LSC) region of 86,555 bp and a small single copy (SSC) region of 17,007 bp, which are separated by a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) regions of 26,128 bp. In addition, a total of 131 genes were annotated including 85 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNA genes, 8 rRNA genes, and one pseudogene yycf1. The overall GC-content of the whole plastome is 38.1%, while the corresponding values of the LSC, SSC, and IR regions are 36.2, 32.5, and 43.1%, respectively. A total of 62 Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) were detected using the online software IMEx (Mudunuri and Nagarajaram 2007). The number of mono-, di-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, and hexa- nucleotides SSRs are 28, 15, 9, 5, 5, and 0, respectively.

To determine the phylogenetic position of A. austroyunnanense, a total of 27 species used to construct the phylogenetic tree among the most of Ranunculaceae species, and Berberidaceae species as outgroups. All of the plastomes were aligned using MAFFT v.7 (Katoh and Standley 2013), and the RAxML (Stamatakis 2014) inference was performed by using GTR model with support for branches evaluated by 1000 bootstrap replicates (Figure 1). Aconitum austroyunnanense is found to be closely related to species of the Aconitum subgenus compared with species of other genera in Ranunculaceae. The complete cp genome of A. austroyunnanense will provide a valuable resource for the conservation genetics of this species as well as for the phylogenetic studies of Aconitum.

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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Maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree inferred from 27 chloroplast genomes. Bootstrap support values >50% are indicated next to the branches.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by Science and Technology Program of Yunnan Province, China [2019ZF003], and Key Project at Central Government Level: The Ability Establishment of Sustainable Use for Valuable Chinese Medicine Resources [2060302], and Special Subsidies for Public Health Services of TCM “The National Survey of TCM Resources” [DSS, MOF. No 66/2017].

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no potential conflict of interests.

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