Tate, J. A. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2026

Three new species of Thelymitra (Diurideae, Orchidaceae) endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand.

Three new species of sun orchid (Thelymitra) endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand are here described. These are T. palustris, T. scabrifolia and T. semaphora. The morphological distinctiveness of these three species has been acknowledged for decades; however, their taxonomic status has remained unresolved. Evidence from existing karyological data, recently generated DNA sequence data (LFY and ycf1) and morphological studies from historical and fresh collections are used here to support their formal description. Both, T. palustris and T. semaphora are restricted to wet habitats north of Auckland (North Island). Thelymitra scabrifolia inhabits mostly scrub, and it has a similar northern North Island distribution, but is has been found also in Manawat[a]whi / Three Kings Islands and historically in Otago (South Island). All three species are polyploids and are of conservation concern.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2020

New targets acquired: improving locus recovery from the Angiosperms353 probe set

Universal target enrichment kits maximise utility across wide evolutionary breadth while minimising the number of baits required to create a cost-efficient kit. Locus assembly requires a target reference, but the taxonomic breadth of the kit means that target references files can be phylogenetically sparse. The Angiosperms353 kit has been successfully used to capture loci throughout angiosperms but includes sequence information from 6-18 taxa per locus. Consequently, reads sequenced from on-target DNA molecules may fail to map to references, resulting in fewer on-target reads for assembly, reducing locus recovery. We expanded the Angiosperms353 target file, incorporating sequences from 566 transcriptomes to produce a mega353 target file, with each gene represented by 17-373 taxa. This mega353 file is a drop-in replacement for the original Angiosperms353 file in HybPiper analyses. We provide tools to subsample the file based on user-selected taxon groups, and to incorporate other transcriptome or protein-coding gene datasets. Compared to the default Angiosperms353 file, the mega353 file increased the percentage of on-target reads by an average of 31%, increased loci recovery at 75% length by 61.9%, and increased the total length of the concatenated loci by 30%. The mega353 file and associated scripts are available at: https://github.com/chrisjackson-pellicle/NewTargets

bioinformatics↗