Meeting Abstract

S8.10  Wednesday, Jan. 6  A survey of cnidarian transcriptomes- diversity through the lens of next-generation sequencing DUNN, CW; Brown University casey_dunn@brown.edu

While there is now strong support for many relationships within Cnidaria across phylogenetic datasets and studies, some important relationships of broad interest have remained unresolved. This is the case even with greatly improved taxon sampling in recent studies that consider from one to several genes. To compliment this many-taxon work, the Assembling the Cnidarian Tree of Life project has collected sequence data for thousands of genes from broadly sampled Cnidarian taxa with an Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) approach. This will enable a phylogenomic analysis of the group, aid in gene discovery for other types of studies, including developmental work, and help reconstruct the genomic content of the most recent ancestor of Cnidaria. These sequence data have been collected with a Roche Genome Sequencer FLX Titanium Series Instrument, using cDNA libraries that were constructed with customized adapters that are optimized for this platform. Here we present various diagnostics of sequencing success with this new technology and preliminary phylogenetic investigations of the data.