A rodent anchored hybrid enrichment probe set for a range of phylogenetic utility – from order to species

Rodents are the largest order of mammals and contain several model organisms important to scientific research in a variety of fields, yet no large set of genomic markers have been designed for this group to date, hindering evolutionary studies into relationships of the group as a whole. Here we present a genomic probe set designed and optimized for rodents with a protocol easy to replicate with little laboratory investment. This design utilizes an anchored hybrid enrichment approach specifically targeting rodents to generate longer loci with a higher mutation rate than existing vertebrate probes to provide utility at various taxonomic levels. Using a test set of rodents from all five suborders we successfully obtained alignments for 416 of the 418 target loci with an average of 1,379 base pairs per locus and a total alignment of more than half a million base pairs. This genomic dataset performed well in all phylogenetic analyses, especially in recent phylogenetic splits, with ample pars...