Molecular evolution and phylogenetic relationships of Ligusticum (Apiaceae) inferred from the whole plastome sequences.

Background: The genus Ligusticum belongs to Apiaceae, and its taxonomy has long been a major difficulty. A robust phylogenetic tree is the basis of accurate taxonomic classification of Ligusticum. We herein used 26 (including 14 newly sequenced) plastome-scale data to generate reliable phylogenetic trees to explore the phylogenetic relationships of Chinese Ligusticum.

Results: We found that these plastid genomes exhibited diverse plastome characteristics across all four currently identified clades in China, while the plastid protein-coding genes were conserved. The phylogenetic analyses by the concatenation and coalescent methods obtained a more robust molecular phylogeny than prior studies and showed the non-monophyly of Chinese Ligusticum. In the concatenation-based phylogeny analyses, the two datasets yielded slightly different topologies that may be primarily due to the discrepancy in the number of variable sites.

Conclusions: Our plastid phylogenomics analyses emphasized that the current circumscription of the Chinese Ligusticum should be reduced, and the taxonomy of Ligusticum urgently needs revision. Wider taxon sampling including the related species of Ligusticum will be necessary to explore the phylogenetic relationships of this genus. Overall, our study provided new insights into the taxonomic classification of Ligusticum and would serve as a framework for future studies on taxonomy and delimitation of Ligusticum from the perspective of the plastid genome.