Abandonment of planting of Gossypium barbadense has endangered its existence. The objective was to determine the characteristicof the maintenance of Gossypium barbadense in the Central-West Region of Brazil, with the aim to foster the conservation of the species. Expeditions were conducted in 2014-2015 in Southeast Goiás, where cotton collection has not been reported before. Data from previous collections in Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Distrito Federal available in Albrana database were considered this study. In the Central-West Region of Brazil, 466 accesses of G. barbadense were recorded, found most frequently in backyards (91.4%), but also spontaneous plants (7.5%), farm boundary (0.8%) and commercial farming (0.2%) have also been found. The main use indicated by VDU was as medicinal plant (0.66), therefore this is the main reason for in situ preservation. However, this cultural habit has been abandoned, causing uncertainty about the continuity of preservation. There was presence of lint almost only in seeds of plants of the variety brasiliense. The most common fiber color was white, not cream color, suggesting that plants are derived from commercial cultivars used in the past. Hence, until 2015, the conservation relies on single plants almost exclusively in backyards for medicinal use, and there are no crops of this type of cotton for commercial purpose. The exploitation of the possible use both of the fiber as a medicinal plant would foster ex situ and in situ preservation of this important genetic resource.

Uncaria species are used in traditional medicine and are considered of high therapeutic value and economic importance. This work describes the assembly and annotation of the chloroplast genomes of U. guianensis and U. tomentosa, as well as a comparative analysis. The genomes were sequenced on MiSeq Illumina, assembled with NovoPlasty, and annotated using CHLOROBOX GeSeq. Addictionaly, comparative analysis were performed with six species from NCBI databases and primers were designed in Primer3 for hypervariable regions based on the consensus sequence of 16 species of the Rubiaceae family and validated on an in-silico PCR in OpenPrimeR. The genome size of U. guianensis and U. tomentosa was 155,505 bp and 156,390 bp, respectively. Both Species have 131 genes and GC content of 37.50%. The regions rpl32-ccsA, ycf1, and ndhF-ccsA showed the three highest values of nucleotide diversity within the species of the Rubiaceae family and within the Uncaria genus, these regions were trnH-psbA, psbM-trnY, and rps16-psbK. Our results indicates that the primer of the region ndhA had an amplification success for all species tested and can be promising for usage in the Rubiaceae family. The phylogenetic analysis recovered a congruent topology to APG IV. The gene content and the chloroplast genome structure of the analyzed species are conserved and most of the genes are under negative selection. We provide the cpDNA of Neotropical Uncaria species, an important genomic resource for evolutionary studies of the group.

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