Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 11 March 2020 doi:10.20944/preprints202003.0181.v1 Peer-reviewed version available at Plants 2020, 9, 752; doi:10.3390/plants9060752 Short Title: Comparison of Withania plastid genomes Comparative Plastomics of Ashwagandha (Withania, Solanaceae) and Identification of Mutational Hotspots for Barcoding Medicinal Plants Furrukh Mehmood1,2, Abdullah1, Zartasha Ubaid1, Yiming Bao3, Peter Poczai2*, Bushra Mirza*1,4 1Department of Biochemistry, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan 2Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 3National Genomics Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 4Lahore College for Women University, Pakistan *Corresponding authors: Bushra Mirza (
[email protected]) Peter Poczai (
[email protected]) 1 © 2020 by the author(s). Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY license. Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 11 March 2020 doi:10.20944/preprints202003.0181.v1 Peer-reviewed version available at Plants 2020, 9, 752; doi:10.3390/plants9060752 Abstract Within the family Solanaceae, Withania is a small genus belonging to the Solanoideae subfamily. Here, we report the de novo assembled, complete, plastomed genome sequences of W. coagulans, W. adpressa, and W. riebeckii. The length of these genomes ranged from 154,198 base pairs (bp) to 154,361 bp and contained a pair of inverted repeats (IRa and IRb) of 25,027--25,071 bp that were separated by a large single-copy (LSC) region of 85,675--85,760 bp and a small single-copy (SSC) region of 18,457--18,469 bp. We analyzed the structural organization, gene content and order, guanine-cytosine content, codon usage, RNA-editing sites, microsatellites, oligonucleotide and tandem repeats, and substitutions of Withania plastid genomes, which revealed close resemblance among the species.