Acer fabri is a small evergreen tree of the family Aceraceae Juss (Acer fabri Hance, 1884; Chen B-H. et al. 2019), having bright red leaves and dense branches (Li Q-Z et al. 2008; Chen B-H. et al. 2019). Native to the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Sichuan in China, the species is suitable for use as a second layer of canopy configuration and for landscape forests, ecological forests, and as a greening tree species (Ji Hua et al. 2012). This study reports the complete chloroplast (cp) genome sequence of A. fabri to serve as a reference for future genetic studies.
The research method for this study was approved by the Guizhou Forestry Bureau (http://www.gzslky.com/). Fresh leaf samples of A. fabri were collected from the Guizhou Academy of Forestry, Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, China (106°14′14″E, 26°29′57″N). The specimen (voucher number 09013526) was deposited at the Guizhou Academy of Forestry (http://www.gzslky.com/, Chen Zhi-ping and [email protected]).High-throughput sequencing was carried out using the Illumina Novaseq 6000 with 150bp pair-end reads. In all, 1Gb raw clean reads were generated.The chloroplast genome was assembled using MITObim v1.9 (Hahn et al. 2013). The annotated genome was deposited in the NCBI GenBank under the accession number MZ664553 (Ku et al. 2013). The phylogenetic tree was further constructed using the IQ-TREE software (Kalyaanamoorthy et al. 2017; Hoang et al. 2018).
The cp genome sequence of A. fabri was revealed to be 156,918 bp in length, with a large single-copy (LSC) region of 85,309 bp, a small single-copy (SSC) region of 18,103 bp, and a pair of invert repeats (IR) regions of 26,753 bp. A total of 113 genes were predicted, including 78 protein-coding genes, 31 tRNA genes, and 4 rRNA genes, having an overall GC content of 37.90%.
To further examine the phylogenetic position of A. fabri, the complete cp genome sequences of the 72 representative species of Acer were downloaded from the NCBI GenBank database for phylogenetic analysis.The complete cp genome sequences were aligned using MAFFT v7.307 (Katoh et al. 2013) and MEGA ver. 7 (Kumar et al. 2016). The resultant ML tree indicated that A. fabri and A. olivaceum (MW067059) formed a strongly supported clade, belonging to Aceraceae. The sister genus Dipteronia with its two species Dipteronia dyeriana (KT985457) and Dipteronia sinensis (KT878501) are considered as out group.