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Article|10 Jan 2018|OPEN
Organellar genome assembly methods and comparative analysis of horticultural plants
Xuelin Wang1 , Feng Cheng2 , Dekai Rohlsen2 , Changwei Bi3 , Chunyan Wang1 , Yiqing Xu1 , Suyun Wei1 , Qiaolin Ye1 , Tongming Yin4 , and Ning Ye,1 ,
1College of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
2Department of Pharmaceutical Science, College of Pharmacy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA
3School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.
4College of Forestry, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
*Corresponding author. E-mail: tmyin@njfu.edu.cn,yening@njfu.edu.cn

Horticulture Research 5,
Article number: 3 (2018)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41438-017-0002-1
Views: 952

Received: 03 May 2017
Revised: 20 Nov 2017
Accepted: 26 Nov 2017
Published online: 10 Jan 2018

Abstract

Although organellar genomes (including chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes) are smaller than nuclear genomes in size and gene number, organellar genomes are very important for the investigation of plant evolution and molecular ecology mechanisms. Few studies have focused on the organellar genomes of horticultural plants. Approximately 1193 chloroplast genomes and 199 mitochondrial genomes of land plants are available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), of which only 39 are from horticultural plants. In this paper, we report an innovative and efficient method for high-quality horticultural organellar genome assembly from next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. Sequencing reads were first assembled by Newbler, Amos, and Minimus software with default parameters. The remaining gaps were then filled through BLASTN search and PCR. The complete DNA sequence was corrected based on Illumina sequencing data using BWA (Burrows–Wheeler Alignment tool) software. The advantage of this approach is that there is no need to isolate organellar DNA from total DNA during sample preparation. Using this procedure, the complete mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes of an ornamental plant, Salix suchowensis, and a fruit tree, Ziziphus jujuba, were identified. This study shows that horticultural plants have similar mitochondrial and chloroplast sequence organization to other seed plants. Most horticultural plants demonstrate a slight bias toward A+T rich features in the mitochondrial genome. In addition, a phylogenetic analysis of 39 horticultural plants based on 15 protein-coding genes showed that some mitochondrial genes are horizontally transferred from chloroplast DNA. Our study will provide an important reference for organellar genome assembly in other horticultural plants. Furthermore, phylogenetic analysis of the organellar genomes of horticultural plants could accurately clarify the unanticipated relationships among these plants.