Data from: Resources for phylogenomic analyses of Australian terrestrial vertebrates

High-throughput sequencing methods promise to improve our ability to infer the evolutionary histories of lineages and to delimit species. These are exciting prospects for the study of Australian vertebrates, a group comprised of many globally unique lineages with a long history of isolation. The evolutionary relationships within many of these lineages have been difficult to resolve with small numbers of loci, and we now know that many lineages also exhibit substantial cryptic diversity. Here, we present a set of phylogenetically diverse transcriptome resources to enable exon-based sequence capture studies of Australian vertebrates, including transcriptome sequences for four species of birds, four frogs, seven lizards and seven mammals. We also use exon data from the marsupial transcriptomes we generated to examine an approach for choosing a moderate number (dozens or hundreds) of phylogenetically informative exons based on a single transcriptome sequence, and a relatively distant reference genome.

高通量测序技术有望提升我们推断谱系演化历史、界定物种类群的能力。这一进展对于澳大利亚脊椎动物的研究而言极具吸引力：该类群包含诸多全球独有的演化谱系，且经历了长期的地理隔离演化历程。此前，依靠少量基因座难以解析诸多此类谱系内部的演化关系；而今我们已证实，不少谱系还存在大量隐存多样性。本研究构建了一组系统发育多样性丰富的转录组资源，以支撑澳大利亚脊椎动物的外显子组序列捕获研究，其中涵盖4种鸟类、4种蛙类、7种蜥蜴与7种哺乳类的转录组序列。此外，我们利用所获得的有袋类转录组外显子数据，开发了一种基于单份转录组序列与相对较远参考基因组，筛选中等数量（数十至数百个）系统发育信息性外显子的方法。