PhD Candidate University of California Riverside, California
With ~45,000 species, the true bugs (Heteroptera: Hemiptera) are ecologically and behaviorally diverse, including diurnal and nocturnal species as well as herbivores and predators. Additionally, many heteropterans are of economic importance, as several are agricultural pests, disease vectors and beneficial biological control agents. Likely in part due to their economic importance, in recent years a large number of analyses have explored relationships among the seven infraorders. While the relationships between infraorders are largely resolved, relationships between superfamilies and families remain uncertain for many groups, and in some cases have yet to be tested. Previous phylogenetic studies have been limited in their scope primarily by low taxonomic sampling, not enough molecular data to resolve relationships, or no molecular data in some cladistic analyses of morphological characters. Using the new alignment-based sequence extraction software (ALiBaSeq) we extracted loci from a combined transcriptomic and genomic dataset, covering over 80% of heteropteran families. We used the 2395 orthologous loci set from Johnson et al. 2018 as our baits and performed reciprocal blast to test for paralogy. We then generated a phylogenetic hypothesis in IQtree and tested relationships between infraorders, superfamilies and families.
