| Anomochloa marantoidea is the earliest diverging extant grass. Its chloroplast genome, or plastome, was extracted and sequenced following the protocol described by Dhingra and Folta and used by Grennan, with the addition of many newly designed primers to rectify lack of sequence similarity between the plastome of Anomochloa and those grass plastomes available for earlier primer design. The data show a number of noteworthy dissimilarities between Anomochloa and those crown grasses for which entire plastomes have previously been sequenced, primarily in non-coding regions; this illustrates the importance of sequencing genomes beyond their coding regions and raises questions about the validity of the definition of the grass family. |
