ABSTRACT
As a common Tibetan herb, Bawo Sebo was mainly used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and urarthritis in Traditional Tibetan medicine. Based on our ethnobotanical survey, the origin of the herb was determined as Swertia verticillifolia T. N. Ho et S. W. Liu (Gentianaceae), endemic to the region of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The diagnostic characters:perennial; stem leaves in whorls; corolla campanulate, yellow-green, 4-lobed; nectary 1 per corolla lobe, naked. Also, its complete chloroplast (cp) genome was sequenced. It is 151 682 bp in length, including a large single copy (LSC) region of 82 623 bp, a small single copy (SSC) region of 18 335 bp and a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) of 25 362 bp. It contains 129 unique genes, including 84 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNAs and 8 rRNAs. This study provides information for understanding the diversity of Swertia cp genomes, and the alpine species identification, conservation and molecular phylogenetic researches of Swertia and Gentianaceae.