Expanding anchored hybrid enrichment to resolve both deep and shallow relationships within the spider tree of life

Background: Despite considerable effort, progress in spider molecular systematics has lagged behind many other comparable arthropod groups, thereby hindering family-level resolution, classification, and testing of important macroevolutionary hypotheses. Recently, alternative targeted sequence capture techniques have provided molecular systematics a powerful tool for resolving relationships across the Tree of Life. One of these approaches, Anchored Hybrid Enrichment (AHE), is designed to recover hundreds of unique orthologous loci from across the genome, for resolving both shallow and deep-scale evolutionary relationships within non-model systems. Herein we present a modification of the AHE approach that expands its use for application in spiders, with a particular emphasis on the infraorder Mygalomorphae. Results: Our aim was to design a set of probes that effectively capture loci informative at a diversity of phylogenetic timescales. Following identification of putative arthropod-wide ...