Characteristic and phylogenetic analyses of chloroplast genome for (Ephedraceae), an important medicinal species.

is an important medicinal plant of (Ephedraceae). The complete chloroplast genome of was assembled from Illumina pair-end sequence reads. The whole chloroplast (cp) genome is 109,548 bp in length and presents a quadripartite structure consisting of two copies of inverted repeat (IR) regions (20,398) separated by a large single copy (LSC) region (60,674 bp) and a small single copy (SSC) region (8078 bp). The cp genome of encodes a total of 118 genes, including 73 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNA genes and 8 rRNA genes. The overall GC content of cp genome is 36.6%. A maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic analysis revealed that was close to . The ML tree also showed Ephedraceae appeared more closely related to Gnetaceae than to the other families in Gymnospermae.