Hemipteroid Insect Assembling the Tree of Life Project

The hemipteroid insect orders (Hemiptera, Psocodea, and Thysanoptera) are a diverse group among the insects, including over 120,000 described species. This group contains many species of ecological, economic, or medical importance, and many of the lineages within this group have piercing-sucking mouthparts. The backbone phylogenetic relationships of this group have not been well studied. One of the major goals of this project is to combine transcriptome and genome sequences (using Illumina sequencing technology) for representatives of all the major lineages of this group and most families to construct a well resolved phylogenetic tree.