The complete chloroplast genome of Vancouveria planipetala, with implication for the phylogeny of Ranunculales.

Vancouveria planipetala (Berberidaceae) is a perennial herb which has high ornamental and ecological values. In this study, we assembled the complete chloroplast (cp) genome of V. planipetala. The whole cp genome of V. planipetala is 156,871 bp in length, comprising a pair of inverted repeat (IR) regions (25,888 bp) separated by a large single copy (LSC) region (88,321 bp) and a small single copy (SSC) region (16,772 bp). The cp genome contains 114 unique genes, including 80 protein-coding genes, 30 tRNA, and four rRNA genes, with 17 genes duplicated in IRs. Phylogenetic analyses showed that Papaveraceae is the basal group of Ranunculales.

Generation and classification of transcriptomes in two Croomia species and molecular evolution of CYC/TB1 genes in Stemonaceae.

The genus Croomia (Stemonaceae) is an excellent model for studying the evolution of the Eastern Asia (EA)-Eastern North America (ENA) floristic disjunction and the genetic mechanisms of floral zygomorphy formation. In addition to the presence of both actinomorphic and zygomorphic flowers within the genus, species are disjunctively distributed between EA and ENA. However, due to the limited availability of genomic resources, few studies of Croomia have examined these questions. In this study, we sequenced the floral and leaf transcriptomes of the zygomorphic flowered C roomia heterosepala and the actinomorphic flowered Croomia japonica, and used comparative genomic approaches to investigate the transcriptome evolution of the two closely related species. The sequencing and de novo assembly of transcriptomes from flowers of C. heterosepala (ChFlower), flowers of C. japonica (CjFlower), and leaves of C. japonica (CjLeaf) yielded 57,193, 62,131 and 64,448 unigenes, respectively. In addition, estimation of Ka/Ks ratios for 11,566 potential orthologous groups between ChFlower and CjFlower revealed that only six pairs had Ka/Ks ratios significantly greater than 1 and are likely under positive selection. A total of 429 single copy nuclear genes (SCNGs) and 21,460 expression sequence tags-simple sequence repeats (EST-SSRs) were identified in this study. Specifically, we identified seven CYC/TB1-like genes from Stemonaceae. Phylogenetic and molecular evolution analyses indicated that these CYC/TB1-like genes formed a monophyletic clade (SteTBL1) and were subject to strong purifying selection. The shifts of floral symmetry in Stemonaceae do not appear to be correlated with TBL copy number.