View article

In flowering plants, plastid genomes are generally conserved, exhibiting slower rates of sequence evolution than the nucleus and little or no change in structural organization. However, accelerated plastid genome evolution has occurred in scattered angiosperm lineages. For example, some species within the genus Silene have experienced a suite of recent changes to their plastid genomes, including inversions, shifts in inverted repeat boundaries, large indels, intron losses, and rapid rates of amino acid sequence evolution in a subset of protein genes, with the most extreme divergence occurring in the protease gene clpP. To investigate the relationship between the rates of sequence and structural evolution, we sequenced complete plastid genomes from three species (Silene conoidea, S. paradoxa, and Lychnis chalcedonica), representing independent lineages within the tribe Sileneae that were previously …