Format: ORAL

Philipp Resl1, Christoph Hahn1

1 Institute of Biology, University of Graz, Austria

The growing availability of genomic data from lichens enables us to test hypotheses about their evolution based on the information from entire genomes. Robust phylogenetic trees derived from the analysis of many genes not only resolve taxonomic relationships but also lay the groundwork for various downstream analyses. This has recently led to several novel findings about the evolution and inner workings of lichen symbioses. While the potential of genome based phylogenetics in lichen research remains huge, challenges in analyzing large genome-scale datasets reliably, reproducibly, and fast also persist. To mitigate common problems encountered in phylogenomics, we developed phylociraptor (http://github.com/reslp/phylociraptor), a tool facilitating streamlined phylogenomic analyses based on the information of hundreds to thousands of genomes. Starting from genome and transcriptome assemblies or sets of proteins, phylociraptor identifies genes, infers orthologs, performs and filters multiple sequence alignments and calculates phylogenomic trees using various methods. Finally, we showcase recent advancements in our understanding of lichen evolution by presenting large-scale phylogenomic analyses of lichens performed with phylociraptor. We will concisely introduce the software and show how it helps to overcome several typical methodological challenges, while employing innovative strategies to enhance the robustness of phylogenomic analyses. The exploration of lichens using large-scale phylogenomic analyses promises to deepen our understanding of these fascinating symbioses, with implications extending to nearly all facets of lichen research.