Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference

Insects are becoming more challenging to collect or may never be collected again due to extinction, habitat loss and fragmentation, climate change, politics, funding, security, among other reasons. If many species are not to be collected again, the use of historical samples will be the only way to study them. This is particularly critical for hyperdiverse groups such as weevils. Despite the various weevil phylogenies available, most of the mid-level weevil lineages (i.e., recognized tribes and genera) remain tentative due to incomplete taxon sampling; thus leading to shifting, non-consensus classification schemes. Nevertheless, target enrichment of Ultraconserved Elements (UCEs) allows us to improve taxon sampling through inclusion of museum specimens in phylogenomic analyses. Because UCEs probe set utility decreases with increasing phylogenetic distance from target taxa, novel probe design that leverages museum specimens is needed to effectively represent weevil genomic diversity. Here we document the design of UCEs probes for 23 weevil genomes available to date, including five newly sequenced and assembled genomes of specimens accessed through the Arizona State University Charles W. O’Brien Collection (ASUCOB; https://doi.org/10.15468/eeqtx0) available at https://ecdysis.org/. We discuss the prospect of our work for further leveraging natural history museum specimens through digital platforms and genomic data.