The first complete chloroplast genome of Hovenia dulcis Thunb. (Rhamnaceae)

The complete chloroplast genome of Hovenia dulcis was sequenced with Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform. It was a typical quadruple structure as other plants of Hovenia with 162,962 bp in length, including a large single-copy (LSC: 90,900 bp) region and a small single-copy (SSC: 18,920 bp) which were separated by a pair of inverted repeats (IRa, b: 26,571 bp) region. The overall GC content is 36.6%. A total of 130 genes was annotated which contained 85 protein-coding genes including the Trans splicing gene of rps12, 37 tRNA genes, and 8 rRNA genes. ML phylogenetic analysis compared with 6 expressed chloroplast genomes of Rhamnaceae revealed that H. dulcis was closely related to the species of Zizyphus, and which were clustered into a group with Z. jujuba, Z. mauritiana and Z. spina-christi. Hovenia dulcis was relatively distant to other species of Berchemiella and Rhamnus, which were clustered into another group.