Mining Ultraconserved Elements from Transcriptome and Genome Data to Explore the Phylogenomics of the Free-living Lice Suborder Psocomorpha (Insecta: Psocodea)

The order Psocodea includes the two historically recognized groups Psocoptera (free-living bark lice) and Phthiraptera (parasitic lice) that were once considered separate orders. Psocodea is divided in three suborders: Trogiomorpha, Troctomorpha, and Psocomorpha, the latter being the largest within the free-living groups. Despite the increasing number of transcriptomes and whole genome sequence (WGS) data available for this group, the relationships among the six known infraorders within Psocomorpha remain unclear. Here, we evaluated the utility of a bait set designed specifically for parasitic lice belonging to suborder Troctomorpha to extract UCE loci from transcriptome and WGS data of 55 bark louse species and explored the phylogenetic relationships within Psocomorpha using these UCE loci markers. Taxon sampling was heavily focused on the families Lachesillidae and Elipsocidae, whose relationships have been problematic in prior phylogenetic studies. We successfully recovered a total of 2,622 UCE loci, with a 40% completeness matrix containing 2,081 UCE loci and an 80% completeness matrix containing 178 UCE loci. The average number of UCE loci recovered for the 55 species was 1,401. The WGS data sets produced a larger number of UCE loci (1,495) on average than the transcriptome data sets (972). Phylogenetic relationships reconstructed with Maximum Likelihood and coalescent-based analysis were concordant regarding the paraphyly of Lachesillidae and Elipsocidae. Branch support values were generally lower in analyses that used a fewer number of loci, even though they had higher matrix completeness.