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. 2021 Mar 15;6(3):886–887. doi: 10.1080/23802359.2021.1886013

The complete chloroplast genome of Tibetan medicinal plant Rubus phoenicolasius Maxim

Guoying Zhang 1, Yarong Liu 1, Ping Hai 1,✉
PMCID: PMC7971196  PMID: 33796668

Abstract

Rubus phoenicolasius Maxim. is a traditional Tibetan medicine and widely used in the clinical pharmacology. In current study, the complete chloroplast genome of R. phoenicolasius was reported. The total length of the genome was 155,144 bp with the GC content of 37.9%. We predicted 130 genes in the genome including 84 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNA genes, 8 rRNA genes and 1 pseudogene. 17 genes were duplicated in the IR regions including 7 tRNA, 4 rRNA and 6 protein-coding genes. Phylogenomic analysis revealed that R. phoenicolasius forms a strong supported branch with R. amabilis and R. coreanus under the Rosaceae clade.

Keywords: Rubus phoenicolasius, chloroplast genome, phylogenetic analysis

Rubus phoenicolasius Maxim. (urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:895791-1), belonging to Rosaceae, is mainly distributed in China, Japan and Korea, and is naturalized in Europe and North America (Wu et al. 2003). As a traditional Tibetan medicine, R. phoenicolasius has long been used for the treatment of rheumatism, irregular menstruation and kidney ailments (Yang 1991). In recent years, most research concerning R. phoenicolasius mainly focused on its chemical composition (Luo et al. 2014), pharmacological activity (Liu et al. 2014), genetic diversity (Innis et al. 2011), and little is known about the chloroplast genome of R. phoenicolasius. In the current study, we report the complete chloroplast genome of R. phoenicolasius based on the next-generation sequencing method.

A wild individual of R. phoenicolasius was collected from Qinghai, China (N 32°39′33″, E 100°57′35″). The specimen was deposited at Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau Museum of Biology (HNWP, Xiaofeng Chi, xfchi@nwipb.cas.cn) under the voucher number Chi202002. The total genomic DNA was extracted from the fresh leaves with the modified CTAB method (Doyle 1987). The DNA sample was randomly fragmented to construct paired-end libraries according to the Illumina standard protocol and the VAHTS Universal DNA Library Prep Kit (Vazyme Biotech, Nanjing, China) was used for preparing the library. Sequencing was conducted on the Illumina Novaseq platform (San Diego, CA, USA). The Q20 and Q30 of the clean data were 97.65% and 92.92%, respectively, which showed that the quality of sequencing was fine. The complete chloroplast genome was assembled by SPAdes v3.10.1 (Bankevich et al. 2012) with the kmer setting at 55, 87 and 121. Annotation was performed on CPGAVAS2 (Shi et al. 2019) coupled with manual adjustment of start/stop codons and intron/exon borders after BLAST searches.

The total length of the R. phoenicolasius chloroplast genome was 155,144 bp including two inverted repeats (IR, 25,973 bp), a large single-copy region (LSC, 84,618 bp) and a small single-copy region (SSC, 18,580 bp). The GC content of the genome is 37.9% with the LSC of 35.6%, the IR of 42.9% and SSC of 31.9%. 130 genes was predicted, including 84 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNA genes, 8 rRNA genes and 1 pseudogene (ycf1). Seven tRNA, four rRNA and six protein-coding genes were duplicated in the IR regions.

Phylogenetic analysis was performed on the PhyloSuite platform (Zhang et al. 2020). The whole plastome sequences of R. phoenicolasius and 28 species in Rosaceae was used for the analysis. Meanwhile Ulmus gaussenii (Ulmaceae) was used as the outgroup. Sequences were aligned using MAFFT (Kazutaka and Standley 2013), and ModelFinder was employed to select the best model for phylogenetic analysis. A maximum likelihood (ML) analysis was conducted on IQ-TREE based on the TVM + F+R3 nucleotide substitution model with 1000 replications (Figure 1). The phylogenetic tree showed that R. phoenicolasius forms a strong supported branch with R. amabilis and R. coreanus under the Rosaceae clade. We expect that the chloroplast genome of R. phoenicolasius will be a valuable resource for future studies on conservation genetics, taxonomy, and phylogeny involving this particular species.

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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IQ-TREE based on 30 complete chloroplast genome sequences. Numbers associated with the branches are bootstrap values.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by Applied Basic Research of Qinghai Province [2020-ZJ-749].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The chloroplast genome and raw sequencing data in this study are available in GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) under the accession numbers of MW115432 and SRR13021958.

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Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Data Availability Statement

The chloroplast genome and raw sequencing data in this study are available in GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) under the accession numbers of MW115432 and SRR13021958.

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