Zonghui Liu¹ , Minghui Huang²

1 Tropical Medicinal Plant Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
2 Institute of Life Science, Jiyang College of Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China
Author    Correspondence author
Medicinal Plant Research, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/mpr.2025.15.0015
Received: 04 May, 2025    Accepted: 10 Jun., 2025    Published: 26 Jun., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Liu Z.H., and Huang M.H., 2025, Pan-genome analysis of Astragalus membranaceus genetic basis of trait diversity, Medicinal Plant Research, 15(3): 142-150 (doi: 10.5376/mpr.2025.15.0015)

 

Astragalus spp., as a valuable traditional Chinese medicinal (TCM) herb, possesses excellent values in utilization due to its rich bioactive ingredients and strong pharmacological activities. Up to now, the genetic basis of the complex germplasm resources and outstanding trait diversity of Astragalus still needs to be comprehensively elucidated. With the accelerated advancement of genomics and pangenomics technologies, it has created new pathways to investigate the molecular mechanisms of trait diversity in medicinal plants over the past few years. This review outlines the advances of Astragalus genomic studies, such as genome sequencing and annotation and gene and metabolic pathway-associated genes with medicinal compounds, and discusses the theory and methods of pangenomics, with a specific emphasis on recent findings in unveiling gene structural variations, compound-related gene diversity, and the genetic basis of stress resistance in Astragalus. Furthermore, this study highlights the genetic determination of diversity of traits, such as the role of gene loss, copy number variation, SNPs, and structural variations in medicinal properties, and integrative analyses between phenotypic diversity and metabolomics and transcriptomics. The potential for applications of Astragalus pangenomics is also touched upon, including the identification of elite germplasm, improvement of medicinal quality, improvement of resistance to stresses, and the building of precision TCM. In addition, interdisciplinary integration-e.g., combination of multi-omics, systems biology, network pharmacology, big data, and artificial intelligence-unlocks new ways to explore the genetic variability of Astragalus. This study emphasizes that the study on the pangenome of Astragalus is of great significance not only for interpreting the genetic basis of trait variability but also for supporting medicinal plant breeding and TCM modernization.

Astragalus; Pangenome; Trait diversity; Medicinal quality; Genetic basis