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Rapidly Evolving Long Exon Capture

RELEC loci are a set of highly informative, protein-coding markers that are optimized to resolve the most difficult nodes in the tree of life. 

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Optimizing Phylogenomics

A major problem in phylogenomics are loci that cannot reconstruct the correct gene tree either due to insufficient information content or poor alignment quality. RELEC genes maximize phylogenetic information content while maintaining presence and orthology across distant evolutionary scales. 

What is a RELEC gene?

RELEC loci are single copy exons that are greater than 1,500 bases in length, have reasonable GC content, and are more rapidly evolving than RAG1 (a commonly used marker with moderate phylogenetic utility). There is no unifying functional role of RELEC genes, but many of them are involved in binding and are expressed at low levels in all tissues.

DNA
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Outperforming the Others

RELEC loci outperform Anchored Hybrid Enrichment and Ultraconserved Elements (two of the most common phylogenomic datasets) in all metrics, including phylogenetic informativeness, bootstrap support, alignment quality, and reduced gene tree estimation error.

Across Amniotes

RELEC loci are being used to resolve some of the most contentious and problematic nodes across terrestrial vertebrates. There are ongoing projects in birds, mammals, and reptiles. They can also be used in amphibians, but fewer are available. It is possible to build new RELEC-like datasets in any group.

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