Phylotranscriptomics to bring the understudied into the fold: monophyletic Ostracoda, fossil placement and pancrustacean phylogeny

An ambitious, yet fundamental goal for comparative biology is to understand the evolutionary relationships for all of life. Yet many important taxonomic groups have remained recalcitrant to inclusion into broader scale studies. Here, we focus on collection of 9 new 454 transcriptome data sets from Ostracoda, an ancient and diverse group with a dense fossil record, which is often under-sampled in broader studies. We combine the new transcriptomes with a new morphological matrix (including fossils) and existing Expressed Sequence Tag (EST), mitochondrial genome, nuclear genome and rDNA data. Our analyses lead to new insights into ostracod and pancrustacean phylogeny. We obtained support for three epic pancrustacean clades that likely originated in the Cambrian: Oligostraca (Ostracoda, Mystacocarida, Branchiura, Pentastomida); Multicrustacea (Copepoda, Malacostraca, Thecostraca); and a clade we refer to as Allotriocarida (Hexapoda, Remipedia, Cephalocarida, Branchiopoda). Within the Oligos...