The chromosome-scale genome of Magnolia officinalis provides insight into the evolutionary position of magnoliids

Yanpeng Yin; Fu Peng; Luojing Zhou; Xianmei Yin; Junren Chen; Hongjin Zhong; Feixia Hou; Xiaofang Xie; Li Wang; Xiaodong Shi; Bo Ren; Jin Pei; Cheng Peng; Jihai Gao

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.102997

The chromosome-scale genome of Magnolia officinalis provides insight into the evolutionary position of magnoliids

iScience. 2021 Aug 17;24(9):102997. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102997. eCollection 2021 Sep 24.

Authors

Yanpeng Yin¹, Fu Peng², Luojing Zhou¹, Xianmei Yin¹, Junren Chen¹, Hongjin Zhong¹, Feixia Hou¹, Xiaofang Xie¹, Li Wang³, Xiaodong Shi⁴, Bo Ren¹, Jin Pei¹, Cheng Peng¹, Jihai Gao¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Southwestern Chinese Medicine Resources, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu 611137, China.
² West China School of Pharmacy, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China.
³ Sichuan Academy of Forestry Sciences, Chengdu 610081, China.
⁴ Chengdu University, Chengdu 610106, China.

Abstract

Magnolia officinalis, a representative tall aromatic tree of the Magnoliaceae family, is a medicinal plant that is widely used in diverse industries from medicine to cosmetics. We report a chromosome-scale draft genome of M. officinalis, in which ∼99.66% of the sequences were anchored onto 19 chromosomes with the scaffold N50 of 76.62 Mb. We found that a high proportion of repetitive sequences was a common feature of three Magnoliaceae with known genomic data. Magnoliids were a sister clade to eudicots-monocots, which provided more support for understanding the phylogenetic position among angiosperms. An ancient duplication event occurred in the genome of M. officinalis and was shared with Lauraceae. Based on RNA-seq analysis, we identified several key enzyme-coding gene families associated with the biosynthesis of lignans in the genome. The construction of the M. officinalis genome sequence will serve as a reference for further studies of Magnolia, as well as other Magnoliaceae.

Keywords: Bioinformatics; Biological sciences; Evolutionary biology; Genetics; Genomic analysis; Genomics.