Pittosporum (Pittosporaceae) is famous as the ornamental and medical values, which is distributed tropical and subtropical regions of Eastern Hemisphere. The few phylogenetic studies have included samples from the Pacific Island, but the phylogenetic relationships of Asian species has not been studied. Here, the complete chloroplast (cp) genomes of ten Pittosporum species from East Asia were first sequenced and compared with those of the published species of this genus. Our results indicated that cp genomes of these species had a typical and conserved quadripartite structure. 131 genes were identical in order and orientation and no changes of inverted repeat (IR) occurred. However, the comparative analysis of cp genomes suggested that sequence divergence mainly appeared in non-coding or intergenic regions, in which several divergence hotspots were identified. By contrast, protein-coding genes showed the lowest variance under strong purifying selection. Phylogenetic analysis based on the cp genome sequences showed that the tested Pittosporum species were clustered into two major clades, in which the Asian species formed Clade I and the remaining species from Australia and New Zealand formed Clade II with high support values, which was consistent with the results of ITS data with low support values. These results suggested that cp genome is a robust phylogenetic indicator for deep nodes in the phylogeny of Pittosporum. Meanwhile, these results will provide the valuable information to better understand the phylogeny and biogeography of Pittosporum.

海桐（Pittosporaceae）以观赏和药用价值而闻名，分布于东半球热带、亚热带地区。少数系统发育研究包括了来自太平洋岛屿的样本，但尚未研究亚洲物种的系统发育关系。在这里，首先对来自东亚的十种海桐属物种的完整叶绿体（cp）基因组进行了测序，并与该属已发表物种的基因组进行了比较。我们的结果表明这些物种的 cp 基因组具有典型且保守的四部分结构。 131 个基因的顺序和方向相同，并且反向重复序列 (IR) 没有发生变化。然而，对cp基因组的比较分析表明，序列分歧主要出现在非编码区或基因间区域，其中发现了几个分歧热点。相比之下，蛋白质编码基因在强纯化选择下表现出最低的方差。基于cp基因组序列的系统发育分析表明，测试的海桐属物种聚类为两个主要分支，其中亚洲物种形成Clade I，其余来自澳大利亚和新西兰的物种形成Clade II，具有较高的支持值，这与支持值较低的 ITS 数据结果。这些结果表明，cp 基因组是海桐系统发育中深层节点的强有力的系统发育指标。同时，这些结果将为更好地了解海桐的系统发育和生物地理学提供有价值的信息。