Evidence for plastome loss in the holoparasitic Mystropetalaceae

作者：Runxian Yu, Matthias Jost, Stefan Wanke, David Bruy, Pan Li, Daniel L. Nickrent, Renchao Zhou · 发表于：New Phytologist · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/nph.70709 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Plant Parasitism and Resistance、Plant Diversity and Evolution、Bryophyte Studies and Records

By definition, holoparasitic plants have lost their ability to photosynthesize, yet nearly all of them have retained a plastome, albeit reduced size and gene content, compared with autotrophic plants (Wicke & Naumann, 2018; Sanchez-Puerta et al., 2023). The holoparasitic plant Pilostyles aethiopica (Apodanthaceae) has the smallest published plastome of 11 348 bp, containing only five plastid genes unrelated to photosynthesis (Bellot & Renner, 2015). To date, only two holoparasitic angiosperm lineages in land plants have been reported to have lost their plastomes: Rafflesia and Sapria in Rafflesiaceae (Molina et al., 2014; Cai et al., 2021) and section Subulatae of Cuscuta in Convolvulaceae (Braukmann et al., 2013; Banerjee & Stefanović, 2023). The latter still needs to be verified with more data, especially from the nuclear genome. Another reported case of plastome loss in green plants is from the non-photosynthetic green alga Polytomella (Smith & Lee, 2014). The sandalwood order Santalales makes up about half of all parasitic angiosperm species (Nickrent, 2020), and two of its families, Balanophoraceae and Mystropetalaceae, consist only of holoparasites. Known plastomes of Balanophoraceae are highly reduced in size (14.6–28.4 kb), extremely AT-rich (78.8–88.4%), and contain the only two genetic code changes recorded in land plants (Ceriotti et al., 2025). Mystropetalaceae, sister to the mistletoe family Loranthaceae (Su et al., 2015), consists of three monotypic genera, name...