Identification and qualification of 500 nuclear, single-copy, orthologous genes for the Eupulmonata (Gastropoda) using transcriptome sequencing and exon-capture

Abstract

The qualification of orthology is a significant challenge when developing large, multiloci phylogenetic datasets from assembled transcripts. Transcriptome assemblies have various attributes, such as fragmentation, frameshifts, and mis-indexing, which pose problems to automated methods of orthology assessment. Here, we identify a set of orthologous single-copy genes from transcriptome assemblies for the land snails and slugs (Eupulmonata) using a thorough approach to orthology determination involving manual alignment curation, gene tree assessment and sequencing from genomic DNA. We qualified the orthology of 500 nuclear, protein coding genes from the transcriptome assemblies of 21 eupulmonate species to produce the most complete gene data matrix for a major molluscan lineage to date, both in terms of taxon and character completeness. Exon-capture targeting 490 of the 500 genes (those with at least one exon > 120 bp) from 22 species of Australian Camaenidae successfully captured sequences of 2,825 exons (representing all targeted genes), with only a 3.7% reduction in the data matrix due to the presence of putative paralogs or pseudogenes. The automated pipeline Agalma retrieved the majority of the manually qualified 500 single-copy gene set and identified a further 375 putative single-copy genes, although it failed to account for fragmented transcripts resulting in lower data matrix completeness. This could potentially explain the minor inconsistencies we observed in the supported topologies for the 21 eupulmonate species between the manually curated and Agalma-equivalent dataset (sharing 458 genes). Overall, our study confirms the utility of the 500 gene set to resolve phylogenetic relationships at a broad range of evolutionary depths, and highlights the importance of addressing fragmentation at the homolog alignment stage for probe design.