Meeting Abstract
Crocodylians are of considerable biological importance as the largest extant reptile and prevail as necessary components of healthy aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Understanding the evolutionary relationships among crocodylians is of vital importance for their conservation especially since many of the charismatic species within this order are listed as threatened or endangered by the ICUN Red List. Therefore, to better understand these organisms at a genomic level, we generated light-to-medium coverage Illumina data for 18 species of crocodylian and curated a comparative structural variant dataset while constructing reference-guided assemblies. Using the box-turtle genome along with multiple bird genomes as outgroups, we produced an array of shared single-copy orthologous genes among all species for selection detection. Putative genes under positive selection were identified and a Bonferroni correction was applied to increase conservativity. These data will improve our understanding of selection among crocodylians and provide a template for future investigation into their genomes.
