The complete chloroplast genome sequence of a warm season ornamental grass, Cenchrus alopecuroides Thunb. 1794 (Poaceae)

Cenchrus alopecuroides Thunb. 1794 is a warm-season ornamental grass with glossy foliage and showy inflorescence, which is widely distributed from eastern Asia to Australia. Although this species is of great economic importance, little genomic sequence data are available. Here, we report the complete chloroplast genome sequence of C. alopecuroides, which provides valuable plastid genomic resources for further studies on this ornamental grass. The chloroplast genome of C. alopecuroides was 138,053 bp in length and exhibited a typical quadripartite structure, which comprised a pair of inverted repeat regions (22,331 bp) separated by a large (81,177 bp) and a small single copy (12,214 bp) region. In total, 110 unique genes were annotated in the chloroplast genome, containing 76 protein-coding genes, 30 transfer RNAs and four ribosomal RNAs. The overall GC content of the chloroplast genome was 38.6%. Phylogenetic analysis based on 11 whole-chloroplast genome sequences of Cenchrus species suggested that C. alopecuroides and C. compressus were sisters to each other and joint sisters to C. clandestinus.