Launching insectphylo.org; a new hub facilitating construction and use of synthesis molecular phylogenies of insects

Abstract

The Holy Grail of an Insect Tree of Life can only be ‘discovered’ through extensive collaboration among taxon specialists, phylogeneticists and centralized frameworks such as Open Tree of Life, but insufficient effort from stakeholders has so far hampered this promising approach. The resultant unavailability of synthesis phylogenies is an unfortunate situation given the numerous practical usages of phylogenies in the near term and against the backdrop of the ongoing biodiversity crisis. To resolve this issue, we establish a new online hub that centralizes the collation of relevant phylogenetic data and provides the resultant synthesis molecular phylogenies. This is achieved through key developments in a proposed pipeline for the construction of a species‐level insect phylogeny. The functionality of the framework is demonstrated through the construction of a highly supported, species‐comprehensive phylogeny of Diptera, built from integrated omics data, COI DNA barcodes, and a compiled database of over 100 standardized, published Diptera phylogenies. Machine‐readable forms of the phylogeny (and subsets thereof) are publicly available at insectphylo.org, a new public repository for species‐comprehensive phylogenies for biological research.

Stability and Assembly Mechanisms of Butterfly Communities across Environmental Gradients of a Subtropical Mountain

“…To improve the phylogenetic topology of COI-only matrices with limited information content, a phylogeny was constructed for the DNA barcodes, integrating information from the backbone tree, according to the constraint method described by Chesters [38]. In the procedure, for setting the backbone topology, we selected the butterfly phylogeny publicly available from insectphylo.org (https://insectphylo.org/lepidoptera/; accessed on 29 July 2023) [39], followed by an additional set of soft constraints for the COIs corresponding to any monophyletic taxa observed in the source trees. The inference was conducted with three partitions corresponding to each codon position and binary partitions according to the taxon constraints inferred from the analysis of backbone tree.…”