The complete chloroplast genome sequence of strawberry ( × Duch.) and comparison with related species of Rosaceae.

Compared with other members of the family Rosaceae, the chloroplast genomes of species exhibit low variation, and this situation has limited phylogenetic analyses; thus, complete chloroplast genome sequencing of species is needed. In this study, we sequenced the complete chloroplast genome of . ×  'Benihoppe' using the Illumina HiSeq 2500-PE150 platform and then performed a combination of assembly and reference-guided mapping of contigs to generate complete chloroplast genome sequences. The chloroplast genome exhibits a typical quadripartite structure with a pair of inverted repeats (IRs, 25,936 bp) separated by large (LSC, 85,531 bp) and small (SSC, 18,146 bp) single-copy (SC) regions. The length of the . ×  'Benihoppe' chloroplast genome is 155,549 bp, representing the smallest chloroplast genome observed to date. The genome encodes 112 unique genes, comprising 78 protein-coding genes, 30 tRNA genes and four rRNA genes. Comparative analysis of the overall nucleotide sequence identity among ten complete chloroplast genomes confirmed that for both coding and non-coding regions in Rosaceae, SC regions exhibit higher sequence variation than IRs. The Ka/Ks ratio of most genes was less than 1, suggesting that most genes are under purifying selection. Moreover, the mVISTA results also showed a high degree of conservation in genome structure, gene order and gene content in , particularly among three octoploid strawberries which were . ×  'Benihoppe', . (GP33) and . (O477). However, when the sequences of the coding and non-coding regions of . ×  'Benihoppe' were compared in detail with those of . (GP33) and . (O477), a number of SNPs and InDels were revealed by MEGA 7. Six non-coding regions (-, -, -, -, - and -) with a percentage of variable sites greater than 1% and no less than five parsimony-informative sites were identified and may be useful for phylogenetic analysis of the genus .