Meeting Abstract
Given the amount of publicly available genomic sequence data, new avenues to incorporate pre-existing data with newly-sequenced data are especially relevant. One challenge in combining data sets for use in evolutionary applications is the assessment of which loci between different genomes are homologous with one another, and then assembling the relevant segments of the genome for those taxa only available as raw sequence data. We took a combined ultra-conserved-element bait-design approach and an automated target-restricted assembly approach to make use of low-coverage whole-genome data sets for population genomic analyses of the holopelagic hydrozoan Liriope tetraphylla. We combined previously-developed software pipelines to identify homologous loci in several pre-existing, fully-assembled hydrozoan genomes. We then identified these loci in our set of raw reads from globally sampled individuals of L. tetraphylla. We report the successful identification and assembly of conserved elements from several taxa across the subphylum and we tested the utility of these loci to address questions at multiple evolutionary scales in L. tetraphylla. Our results point to a novel use of raw sequencing libraries or assembled genomes from publicly available data sets. We anticipate future investigation into the nature of these conserved loci may allow their application to deeper phylogenetic questions within Hydrozoa.
