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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional and Applied Plant Genomics
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1535549

Exploring Heliconia chloroplast genomic features through assembly and analysis of four complete chloroplast genomes

Provisionally accepted
Xin Cheng Xin Cheng 1,2*Chengcheng Shi Chengcheng Shi 2Ting Yang Ting Yang 2Qijin Ge Qijin Ge 2John Kress John Kress 3XIN LIU XIN LIU 1,2*
  • 1 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • 2 BGI Research, Beijing, China
  • 3 National Museum of Natural History (SI), Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Heliconia, a genus within the Zingiberales order, is renowned for its diverse morphology, suggesting a rich genetic reservoir. However, genetic research on plants within the Heliconiaceae family remains predominantly focused on taxonomy and phylogenetics, with limited exploration into other genetic aspects. In this study, we performed sequencing and assembly of the complete chloroplast genomes of four representative Heliconia species: Heliconia bihai, Heliconia caribaea, Heliconia orthotricha, and Heliconia tortuosa. The chloroplast genomes of these Heliconia species exhibited the typical quadripartite structure and ranged in length from 161,680 bp to 161,913 bp, all containing 86 protein-coding genes. Comparative analysis showed that the chloroplast genome structures of different Heliconia species were generally similar. However, the chloroplast genome of Heliconia is slightly shorter than those of other Zingiberales species, a feature attributed to the shortened length of the inverted repeat region. Notably, Heliconiaceae species exhibit lower nucleotide diversity in their chloroplast genomes compared to other families within the Zingiberales order. This study provides important insights into the chloroplast genome structure of Heliconia and contributes to the broader understanding of chloroplast genome evolution within the Zingiberales family. The data generated here also offer valuable resources for future genetic studies on Heliconia and related species.

    Keywords: Heliconiaceae, Heliconia, Chloroplast genome, Genomic features, Zingiberales

    Received: 27 Nov 2024; Accepted: 24 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Cheng, Shi, Yang, Ge, Kress and LIU. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Xin Cheng, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
    XIN LIU, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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