The Complete Chloroplast Genome of Lepidium olgae, a Narrow Endemic Species of the Nuratau Range, Uzbekistan

Lepidium olgae Regel is a poorly studied narrow endemic of the Nuratau Range, Uzbekistan, for which genomic resources remain limited. In this study, we sequenced, assembled, and characterized its complete chloroplast genome and evaluated its phylogenetic position using 17 Lepidium plastome accessions representing 17 taxa, together with four outgroup plastomes. Four plastomes from Hornungia and Yinshania were included as outgroups in the phylogenetic analysis. The circular plastome of L. olgae was 154,837 bp in length and displayed the typical quadripartite structure, comprising an 83,881-bp large single-copy region, an 18,070-bp small single-copy region, and two inverted-repeat regions of 26,443 bp each. The overall GC content was 36.3%. Comparative analysis showed that plastome size, gene order, and overall genome organization were highly conserved among the sampled Lepidium taxa, with only limited variation at the single-copy and inverted-repeat junctions. Feature-level nucleotide-diversity analysis identified trnG-GCC–trnR-UCU and rpl32–trnL-UAG among the most variable non-coding regions, whereas ycf1 showed the highest diversity among the examined coding regions. Maximum-likelihood analysis of 21 complete plastomes placed L. olgae as a distinct lineage within the sampled Asian Lepidium assemblage. The newly generated plastome provides an important genomic reference for L. olgae , while the identified variable regions represent candidate loci for future taxonomic, phylogeographic, and population-level studies. Broader taxonomic sampling and nuclear genomic data will be required to clarify the evolutionary history of the genus and assess the conservation genetics of this narrow endemic species.