Transcriptomes of members of the enigmatic eukaryotic phylum, Telonemia

Resolving the eukaryotic tree of life is one of the main aims of evolutionary biology. Currently, there are still many protist lineages that have long been known from early morphological description but remain without clear evolutionary affinities. Telonemia is one such orphan taxon that has proven difficult to place in eukaryote-wide phylogenies in spite of several molecular attempts. The group contains only two named species but has been proposed to form a phylum of its own. In this study, we established cultures of three telonemid species and generated their transcriptomes. We then use a phylogenomics approach to infer with confidence the phylogenetic position of this important eukaryote group