Chloroplast genomes have been widely used in studying plant phylogeny and evolution. Several chloroplast genome visualization tools have been developed to display the distribution of genes on the genome. However, these tools do not draw features, such as exons, introns, repetitive elements, and variable sites, disallowing in‐depth examination of the genome structures. Here, we developed and validated a software package called Chloroplast Genome Viewers (CPGView). CPGView can draw three maps showing (i) the distributions of genes, variable sites, and repetitive sequences, including microsatellites, tandem and dispersed repeats; (ii) the structure of the cis‐splicing genes after adjusting the exon‐intron boundary positions using a coordinate scaling algorithm, and (iii) the structure of the trans‐splicing gene rps12. To test the accuracy of CPGView, we sequenced, assembled, and annotated 31 chloroplast genomes from 31 genera of 22 families. CPGView drew maps correctly for all the 31 chloroplast genomes. Lastly, we used CPGView to examine 5998 publicly released chloroplast genomes from 2513 genera of 553 families. CPGView succeeded in plotting maps for 5882 but failed to plot maps for 116 chloroplast genomes. Further examination showed that the annotations of these 116 genomes had various errors needing manual correction. The test on newly generated data and publicly available data demonstrated the ability of CPGView to identify errors in the annotations of chloroplast genomes. CPGView will become a widely used tool to study the detailed structure of chloroplast genomes. The web version of CPGView can be accessed from http://www.1kmpg.cn/cpgview.

Clerodendranthus spicatus (Thunb.) C.Y.Wu is one of the most important medicine for the treatment of nephrology which distributes in south-east of China. In this study, we obtained the complete chloroplast genome of C. spicatus with a length of 152155bp, including a large single copy (LSC) region of 83098bp, small single copy (SSC) region of 17665bp and a pair of inverted repeat (IR) regions of 25696bp with the GC content of 37.86%. The genome contains 36 tRNA, 8 rRNA and 87 protein-coding genes. Most of them have one intron except the ycf3, rps12 and clpP genes. The length of rRNAs varies from 131bp to 2811bp and the GC contents are between 45.28% and 56.54%. The frequency of Isoleucine is fruitful accounting for 4.17%. The codons of AUG, UUA and AGA codon had presence of higher codon usage bias. For the repetitive sequence analysis, Thirty-six tandem repeats were identi ed with certain conditions. Forty interspersed repeats were identi ed, including 22 palindromic repeats and 18 direct repeats. The diverse positions of the speci c rps19, ycf1, rpl2, trnH, psbA genes within the IR boundary analysis. The genetic distance analysis of the intergenic spacer regions for 5 relative species showed the areas of ndhG-ndhI, accD-psaI, rps15-ycf1, rpl20-clpP, ccsA-ndhD had high K2p value to distinguish the species through developing the molecular markers. From phylogenetic tree, C. spicatu was closely related to the genus of two Salvia speices, Tectona grandis, Cistanche deserticola and Glechoma longituba belonged to the Lamiales.