Complete chloroplast genome sequence of the medicinal plant <i>Arctium</i> <i>lappa</i>

Abstract

<i>Arctium lappa</i>, commonly called burdock, has a long medicinal and edible history. It has recently gained increasing attention because of its economic value. In this study, we obtained the complete chloroplast genome of <i>A. lappa</i> by Illumina Hiseq. The complete chloroplast genome of <i>A. lappa</i> is a typical circular structure with 152 708 bp in length. The GC content in the whole chloroplast genome of <i>A. lappa</i> is 37.7%. A total of 37 tRNA genes, 8 rRNA genes, and 87 protein-coding genes were successfully annotated. And the chloroplast genome contains 113 unique genes, 19 of which are duplicated in the inverted repeat. The distribution of 39 simple sequence repeats was analysed, and most of them are in the large single-copy (LSC) sequence. An inversion comprising 16 genes was found in the LSC region, which is 26 283 bp long. We performed multiple sequence alignments using 72 common protein-coding genes of 29 species and constructed a Maximum Parsimony (MP) tree. The MP phylogenetic result shows that <i>A. lappa</i> grouped together with <i>Carthamus tinctorius</i>, <i>Centaurea diffusa</i>, and <i>Saussurea involucrata</i>. The chloroplast genome of <i>A. lappa</i> is a valuable resource for further studies in Asteraceae.