plants Article Comparative Chloroplast Genomics of Endangered Euphorbia Species: Insights into Hotspot Divergence, Repetitive Sequence Variation, and Phylogeny Arif Khan 1,2, Sajjad Asaf 1 , Abdul Latif Khan 1,*, Tariq Shehzad 3 , Ahmed Al-Rawahi 1 and Ahmed Al-Harrasi 1,* 1 Natural and Medical Sciences Research Center, University of Nizwa, Nizwa 616, Oman;
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[email protected] (A.A.-R.) 2 Genomics Group, Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture, Nord University, 8049 Bodø, Norway 3 Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, 2713 Doha, Qatar;
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[email protected] (A.A.-H.) Received: 18 November 2019; Accepted: 17 January 2020; Published: 5 February 2020 Abstract: Euphorbia is one of the largest genera in the Euphorbiaceae family, comprising 2000 species possessing commercial, medicinal, and ornamental importance. However, there are very little data available on their molecular phylogeny and genomics, and uncertainties still exist at a taxonomic level. Herein, we sequence the complete chloroplast (cp) genomes of two species, E. larica and E. smithii, of the genus Euphorbia through next-generation sequencing and perform a comparative analysis with nine related genomes in the family. The results revealed that the cp genomes had similar quadripartite structure, gene content, and genome organization with previously reported genomes from the same family. The size of cp genomes ranged from 162,172 to 162,358 bp with 132 and 133 genes, 8 rRNAs, 39 tRNA in E. smithii and E.