Background
Amaryllidaceae is a family of Monocotyledons in Liliflorae, and is considered an important ornamental and economic plant due to its usually showy flowers, and the Amaryllidaceae also has enormous medicinal value. Currently, the gene structure characteristics and molecular function analysis of all chloroplast genomes in Amaryllidaceae are rarely reported, so this study mainly analyzed the gene structure characteristics and molecular function of all chloroplast genomes in Amaryllidaceae to reveal the characteristics of the chloroplast genome of Amaryllidaceae plants and explore their evolution and development patterns, and it used bioinformatics methods to analyze the chloroplast genome sequences of 64 Amaryllidaceae plants that have been published on NCBI.
Results
Among the 64 species of Amaryllidaceae plants, the species with a gene number of 86 had the most chloroplasts, with 38 species accounting for approximately 59%. The number of rRNAs in its chloroplast genome is all 8. There are 55 species of plants in the Amaryllidaceae with 38 tRNAs, and only a few species have abnormal tRNA numbers in their chloroplast genomes due to the loss or duplication of tRNA genes. The GC content of chloroplast genomes in all species ranges from 36–39%, indicating that their AT content is roughly between 61–64%. The high proportion of AT content in chloroplast genomes indicates that chloroplast codons prefer to use A/T bases. By constructing a phylogenetic evolution tree, it was found that the 64 species of Amaryllidaceae plants can be divided into 12 evolutionary groups. Lycoris longituba and Lycoris anhuiensis have the fastest evolutionary speed, while Allium przewalskianum and Allium polyrhizum CMS-S have the most primitive and slowest evolutionary speed. By analyzing the codon preference of chloroplast genomes, it was found that plants in the Amaryllidaceae prefer to use synonymous codons ending in A/U, and their chloroplast genome codon usage bias is weak.
Conclusion
Our results preliminarily explored the relationship between each species in Amaryllidaceae, and the characteristics of the entire chloroplast genome sequence of Amaryllidaceae were revealed, these results provide a certain theoretical basis for further research on the plants of the Amaryllidaceae family in the future.