Disporum viridescens is a medicinal plant in three provinces of Northeast China. In this paper, we report the characteristics of the complete chloroplast genome (CP) of Disporum viridescens. We discuss mainly the phylogenetic relationship between this species and its relatives. The length of its sequence was 156,645 bp, with a total GC content of 37.6% A large single-copy region (LSC) of 85,103 bp, a small single-copy region (SSC) of 17,964 bp, and a pair of inverted repeat (IR) regions of 26,789 bp were detected in this study. The complete chloroplast genome sequence contained 127 genes, including 81 encoding, 38 transfer RNA (tRNA), and 8 ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. Our phylogenetic analysis results showed that Disporum viridescens is closely phylogenetically related to Disporum cantoniense of the family Colchicaceae.

Polygonum cuspidatum, an important medicinal plant, is rich in resveratrol and polydatin, but it frequently suffers from drought stress in the nursery stage, which inhibits the plant’s growth, active components concentrations, and the price of rhizome in the later stage. The purpose of this study was to analyze how exogenous 100 mM melatonin (MT) (an indole heterocyclic compound) affected biomass production, water potential, gas exchange, antioxidant enzyme activities, active components levels, and resveratrol synthase (RS) gene expression of P. cuspidatum seedlings growing under well-watered and drought stress conditions. The 12-week drought treatment negatively affected the shoot and root biomass, leaf water potential, and leaf gas exchange parameters (photosynthetic rate, stomatal conductance, and transpiration rate), whereas the application of exogenous MT significantly increased these variables of stressed and non-stressed seedlings, accompanied by higher increases in the biomass, photosynthetic rate, and stomatal conductance under drought versus well-watered conditions. Drought treatment raised the activities of superoxide dismutase, peroxidase, and catalase in the leaves, while the MT application increased the activities of the three antioxidant enzymes regardless of soil moistures. Drought treatment reduced root chrysophanol, emodin, physcion, and resveratrol levels, while it dramatically promoted root polydatin levels. At the same time, the application of exogenous MT significantly increased the levels of the five active components, regardless of soil moistures, with the exception of no change in the emodin under well-watered conditions. The MT treatment also up-regulated the relative expression of PcRS under both soil moistures, along with a significantly positive correlation between the relative expression of PcRS and resveratrol levels. In conclusion, exogenous MT can be employed as a biostimulant to enhance plant growth, leaf gas exchange, antioxidant enzyme activities, and active components of P. cuspidatum under drought stress conditions, which provides a reference for drought-resistant cultivation of P. cuspidatum.