Comparison and Phylogenetic Analyses of Nine Complete Chloroplast Genomes of Zingibereae

Zingibereae is a large tribe in the family Zingiberaceae, which contains plants with important medicinal, edible, and ornamental values. Although tribes of Zingiberaceae are well circumscribed, the circumscription of many genera within Zingibereae and the relationships among them remain elusive, esp...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Heng Liang, Juan Chen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
Series:Forests
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/12/6/710
Description
Summary:Zingibereae is a large tribe in the family Zingiberaceae, which contains plants with important medicinal, edible, and ornamental values. Although tribes of Zingiberaceae are well circumscribed, the circumscription of many genera within Zingibereae and the relationships among them remain elusive, especially for the genera of <i>Boesenbergia</i><i>, Curcuma</i><i>, Kaempferia</i> and <i>Pyrgophyllum</i>. In this study, we investigated the plastome variation in nine species representing five genera of Zingibereae. All plastomes showed a typical quadripartite structure with lengths ranging from 162,042 bp to 163,539 bp and contained 132–134 genes, consisting of 86–88 coding genes, 38 transfer RNA genes and eight ribosomal RNA genes. Moreover, the characteristics of the long repeats sequences and simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were detected. In addition, we conducted phylogenomic analyses of the Zingibereae and related taxa with plastomes data from additional 32 species from Genbank. Our results confirmed that <i>Stahlianthus</i> is closely related to <i>Curcuma</i>, supporting the idea of merging it into <i>Curcuma</i>. <i>Kaempferia</i>, <i>Boesenbergia</i> and <i>Zingiber </i>were confirmed as close relatives and grouped together as the <i>Kaempferia</i> group. <i>Pyrgophyllum</i> is not allied with the <i>Curcuma</i> clade but instead is embedded within the <i>Hedychium </i>clade. Our results demonstrate the power of plastid phylogenomics in improving the phylogenetic relationships within Zingibereae and provide a new insight into plastome evolution in Zingibereceae.
ISSN:1999-4907