Resources for phylogenomic analyses of Australian terrestrial vertebrates

High-throughput sequencing methods promise to improve our ability to infer the evolutionary histories of lineages and to delimit species. These are exciting prospects for the study of Australian vertebrates, a group comprised of many globally unique lineages with a long history of isolation. The evolutionary relationships within many of these lineages have been difficult to resolve with small numbers of loci, and we now know that many lineages also exhibit substantial cryptic diversity. Here, we present a set of phylogenetically diverse transcriptome resources to enable exon-based sequence capture studies of Australian vertebrates, including transcriptome sequences for four species of birds, four frogs, seven lizards and seven mammals. We also use exon data from the marsupial transcriptomes we generated to examine an approach for choosing a moderate number (dozens or hundreds) of phylogenetically informative exons based on a single transcriptome sequence, and a relatively distant refere...

高通量测序（high-throughput sequencing）技术有望提升我们推断支系演化历史、界定物种类群的能力。这对于澳大利亚脊椎动物（Australian vertebrates）的研究而言是极具吸引力的发展前景——该类群包含诸多全球特有支系，且拥有长期的隔离演化历史。此前，借助少量基因座（loci）难以解析诸多支系内部的演化关系，而如今我们已明确，不少支系还存在大量隐蔽多样性（cryptic diversity）。本研究构建了一组系统发育多样性丰富的转录组（transcriptome）资源，以支持澳大利亚脊椎动物的外显子组序列捕获研究，其中包含4种鸟类、4种蛙类、7种蜥蜴及7种哺乳类的转录组序列。此外，我们还利用所获得的有袋类（marsupial）转录组的外显子数据，探索了一种基于单份转录组序列筛选适量（数十至数百个）系统发育信息外显子的方法，以及一种相对较远的参照（refere...）