DESIGNING PHYLOGENOMIC TOOLS TO DISENTANGLE THE EVOLUTION OF STONY CORALS

Abstract

An ancient and diverse clade with enormous ecological and economic importance, stony corals (Anthozoa: Scleractinia) form the backbone of coral reefs around the world. Nevertheless, a robust phylogeny remains elusive to date, due to a paucity of consistent and phylogenetically informative markers. To resolve this short-coming, this project captalises on recent advances in sequencing methods in order to identify consistent loci and design baits for hybrid capture across the scleractinian tree of life. Firstly, transcriptomes of over 40 scleractinians were used for ortholog identification. Following which, baits were designed and tested on 18 scleractinians, identifying only putative coral loci (n=452). Finally, hybrid capture on the filtered loci was conducted on over 400 samples of scleractinians, using both in silico and in vitro methods. This thesis marks the largest phylogenomic reconstruction for scleractinians to date, and has potential in resolving evolutionary questions related to biogeography and trait evolution, among others.