Complete Plastome of Three Korean Asarum (Aristolochiaceae): Confirmation Tripartite Structure within Korean Asarum and Comparative Analyses

• Published in: Plants (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 10; p. 2056
• Main Authors: Yoo, Mi-Jeong, Jin, Dong-Pil, Lee, Hyun-Oh, Lim, Chae Eun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 29-09-2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Aristolochiaceae; Asarum; Comparative analysis; Genes; genomic rearrangement; Inverted repeat; Medicinal plants; Ornamental plants; Phylogenetics; Phylogeny; plastome; Plastomes; Polymorphism; Proteins; Ribosomal DNA; Simple sequence repeats; Species; Taxonomy; tripartite structure; South Korea; China; Japan; genomic rearrangement; tripartite structure; phylogeny; plastome; Asarum
• ISSN: 2223-7747; 2223-7747
• DOI: 10.3390/plants10102056

The genus
(Aristolochiaceae) is a well-known resource of medicinal and ornamental plants. However, the taxonomy of Korean
is ambiguous due to their considerable morphological variations. Previously, a unique plastome structure has been reported from this genus. Therefore, we investigated the structural change in the plastomes within three Korean
species and inferred their phylogenetic relationships. The plastome sizes of
species assembled here range from 190,168 to 193,356 bp, which are longer than a typical plastome size (160 kb). This is due to the incorporation and duplication of the small single copy into the inverted repeat, which resulted in a unique tripartite structure. We first verified this unique structure using the Illumina Miseq and Oxford Nanopore MinION platforms. We also investigated the phylogeny of 26 Aristolochiaceae species based on 79 plastid protein-coding genes, which supports the monophyly of Korean
species. Although the 79 plastid protein-coding gene data set showed some limitations in supporting the previous classification, it exhibits its effectiveness in delineating some sections and species. Thus, it can serve as an effective tool for resolving species-level phylogeny in Aristolochiaceae. Last, we evaluated variable sites and simple sequence repeats in the plastome as potential molecular markers for species delimitation.