RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Museomics of a rare taxon: placing Whalleyanidae in the Lepidoptera Tree of Life
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.08.18.255182
DO 10.1101/2020.08.18.255182
A1 Twort, Victoria G.
A1 Minet, Joël
A1 Wheat, Christopher W.
A1 Wahlberg, Niklas
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/18/2020.08.18.255182.abstract
AB Museomics is a valuable tool that utilises the diverse biobanks that are natural history museums. The ability to sequence genomes from old specimens has expanded not only the variety of interesting taxa available to study but also the scope of questions that can be investigated in order to further knowledge about biodiversity. Here we present whole genome sequencing results from the enigmatic genus Whalleyana, as well as the families Callidulidae and Hyblaeidae. Library preparation was carried out on four museum specimens and one existing DNA extract and sequenced with Illumina short reads. De novo assembly resulted in highly fragmented genomes with the N50 ranging from 317 – 2,078 bp. Mining of a manually curated gene set of 332 genes from these draft genomes had an overall gene recovery rate of 64 – 90%. Phylogenetic analysis places Whalleyana as sister to Callidulidae, and Hyblaea as sister to Pyraloidea. Since the former sister-group relationship turns out to be also supported by ten morphological synapomorphies, we propose to formally assign the Whalleyanidae to the superfamily Calliduloidea. These results highlight the usefulness of not only museum specimens, but also existing DNA extracts, for whole genome sequencing and gene mining for phylogenomic studies.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.