Characterization of the complete chloroplast genome of Arabis stellari and comparisons with related species

Arabis stellari var. japonica is an ornamental plant of the Brassicaceae family, and is widely distributed in South Korea. However, no information is available about its molecular biology and no genomic study has been performed on A. stellari. In this paper, the authors report the complete chloroplast genome sequence of A. stellari. The plastome of A. stellari was 153,683 bp in length with 36.4% GC and included a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) of 26,423 bp that separated a large single-copy (LSC) region of 82,807 bp and a small single-copy (SSC) region of 18,030 bp. It was also found to contain 113 unique genes, of which 79 were protein-coding genes, 30 were transfer RNAs, and four were ribosomal RNAs. The gene content and organization of the A. stellari chloroplast genome were similar to those of other Brassicaceae genomes except for the absence of the rps16 protein-coding gene. A total of 991 SSRs were identified in the genome. The chloroplast genome of A. stellari was compared with closely related species of the Brassicaceae family. Comparative analysis showed a minor divergence occurred in the protein-coding matK, ycf1, ccsA, accD and rpl22 genes and that the K(A)/K(S) nucleotide substitution ratio of the ndhA genes of A. stellari and A. hirsuta was 1.35135. The genes infA and rps16 were absent in the Arabis genus and phylogenetic evolutionary studies revealed that these genes evolved independently. However, phylogenetic analysis showed that the positions of Brassicaceae species are highly conserved. The present study provides A. stellari genomic information that may be found useful in conservation and molecular phylogenetic studies on Brassicaceae.