Meeting Abstract

65.3  Friday, Jan. 6  Genome-wide ultraconserved elements exhibit higher phylogenetic informativeness than traditional fish markers GILBERT, P.S.*; CHANG, J.; FAIRCLOTH, B.; ALFARO, M.E.; Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Univ. of California, Los Angeles ps.gilbert@ucla.edu

We have recently developed a phylogenomic approach for fishes based upon sequence capture of regions flanking ultraconservative elements (UCEs) that enables the generation of data matrices with hundreds or even thousands of loci. Although it might seem reasonable to assume that the resolving power of a data matrix of this size would exceed that of traditional approaches which are often based upon 10-20 protein coding genes, the relative performance of these two approaches have never been assessed. Here we compare the phylogenetic informativeness (PI) of these two types of data matrices by analyzing the resolving power of UCEs and their flanking regions against protein-coding genes developed for high-level fish phylogenetics. Per base pair (bp) and net PI was calculated across shallow, medium and deep time epochs for the euteleost phylogeny. We also calculated and compared PI for each data matrix type. UCEs with 200bp flanking regions outperformed the protein-coding genes at every time epoch (PI = 43x, 46x and 43x higher at shallow, medium and deep time epochs respectively). However the average per site PI for protein-coding genes was two orders of magnitude higher than UCEs with 200bp flanking region at shallow and deep time epochs. Our findings support using UCEs and their flanking regions in euteleost phylogenetics as this approach massively increases the phylogenetic resolving power of our data set.