Onychophoran UCE probeset

Onychophora are cryptic, soil-dwelling invertebrates known for their biogeographic affinities, diversity of reproductive modes, close phylogenetic relationship to arthropods, and peculiar prey capture mechanism. A well resolved phylogenetic backbone for the phylum has yet to be resolved for the phylum which has hindered our understanding of onychophoran biogeographic patterns, evolutionary history, and systematics. Particularly problematic has been the Neotropical clade of Peripatidae due to their rapid radiation during the Cretaceous. To address these issues, we designed a high affinity ultra-conserved element (UCE) probe set for Onychophora. This new resource could drastically increase the power of molecular datasets and potentially allow access to genomic scale data from archival museum specimens to further tackle the issues exasperating onychophoran systematics.