The complete chloroplast genome of Castanopsis mekongensis A. Camus (Fagaceae)

Castanopsis mekongensis is highly valued in the furniture industry for its good wood texture, an endemic species in Yunnan province, southwest China. In our study, the chloroplast genome of C. mekongensis was assembled and characterized based on Illumina pair-end sequencing data. The total genome size of C. mekongensis was 160,699 bp, displayed a typical quadripartite structure including a pair of inverted repeat (IRs, 25,714 bp) regions separated by a large single-copy (LSC, 90,278 bp) region and a small single-copy (SSC, 18,963 bp) region. The overall guanine–cytosine (GC) content was 36.8%. We annotated 130 genes in the genome, containing 85 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNA genes, and eight rRNA genes, 12 genes contain a single intron, and two genes have two introns. The result of phylogenetic analysis based on maximum-likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree indicated that C. mekongensis was most closely related to C. hainanensis.