Review on the Development and Applications of Medicinal Plant Genomes

Abstract

With the development of sequencing technology, the research on medicinal plants is no longer limited to the aspects of chemistry, pharmacology, and pharmacodynamics, but reveals them from the genetic level. As the price of next-generation sequencing technology becomes affordable, and the long-read sequencing technology is established, the medicinal plant genomes with large sizes have been sequenced and assembled more easily. Although the review of plant genomes has been reported several times, there is no review giving a systematic and comprehensive introduction about the development and application of medicinal plant genomes that have been reported until now. Here, we provide a historical perspective on the current situation of genomes in medicinal plant biology, highlight the use of the rapidly developing sequencing technologies, and conduct a comprehensive summary on how the genomes apply to solve the practical problems in medicinal plants, like genomics-assisted herb breeding, evolution history revelation, herbal synthetic biology study, and geoherbal research, which are important for effective utilization, rational use and sustainable protection of medicinal plants.

Keywords: application; genome; long-read sequencing technology; medicinal plant; sequencing.

FIGURE 1

A flowchart of literature search and selection for a systematic review about medicinal plant genomes.

FIGURE 2

Publication history (A) and general information (B) of medicinal plant genomes. (A) The total number and repeated sequencing number of medicinal plant genomes are increasing year by year, proving that it has received more and more scientific research attention. (B) The figure shows published medicinal genome assemblies analyzed for genome-wide repeat levels and genome size. The repetitiveness of most medicinal plant genomes is generally high and correlated to genome size. The sequenced medicinal plants are divided into five groups based on phylogeny, including lycopodiophyta, gymnosperms, eudicots, monocots, and magnoliids, and eudicot accounts for the majority of them.

FIGURE 3

Distribution of contig N50 length in published medicinal plant genomes. Before 2016 represents the published years before 2016, and 2021.06 represents the time between 2021 January and June.

FIGURE 4

The development process of medicinal plant genome sequencing.

FIGURE 5

The whole genome duplication (WGD) and whole genome triplication (WGT) events in representative medicinal plants.