Chloroplast sequencing of South American maize landraces

South American maize landraces (Zea mays ssp. mays) are grown across a wide variety of agroecosystems, providing a valuable reservoir of locally adapted gene pools. Early attempts to use organellar genomes to infer phylogeographic processes within the species were conditioned by the limited variation accessible at that time. That scenario was greatly changed by the advent of NGS techniques, meriting a new assessment of plastome potential for intraspecific analyses, offering a promising perspective for plant phylogeography. Therefore, we provide novel sequences of the complete plastomes of 31 South American maize landraces and three teosintes. These sequences were combined with data from public repositories in order to estimate plastome intraspecific variation within Z. mays and assess its utility to investigate maize dispersal to South America. Extending its usage to the assessment of intraspecific variation in the context of phylogenetic studies may allow for a more comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes at low taxonomic levels.