Paper Title
SNP Analysis In Chloroplast Genome Of Eight Catharanthus Roseus Varieties

Abstract
Catharanthus roseus is widely used as medicinal plant while it produces secondary metabolites with therapeutic significance, such as antitumor drugs. There are different varieties of this plant which can be identified by their flowers colors. Therefore, the identification of varieties is very difficult before the flowering stage. Because all varieties appear to be similar morphologically in the vegetative stage. Therefore, there is an urgent need for alternative and fast mothed for identification. Distinguishing varieties become more important while some contain higher levels of pharmaceuticals than others. In current study, next generation sequencing for the genomic DNA of eight C. roseus varieties was done by using Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform. Each genome is aligned separately to the chloroplast reference genome. This resulted in detecting unique chloroplast SNPs to each variety which can be used as molecular markers. Also, high percentage of SNPs were heteroplasmic confirming the applicability of the heteroplasmy theory in chloroplast genome of C. roseus. Finally, phylogenetic distances among varieties were estimated.