An updated and extended version of the Melastomataceae probe set for target capture.

ABSTRACT

Premise A probe set was previously designed to target 384 nuclear loci in the Melastomataceae family; however, when trying to use it, we encountered several practical and conceptual problems, such as the presence of sequences in reverse complement, intronic regions with stop codons, and other issues. This raised concerns regarding the use of this probe set for sequence recovery in Melastomataceae. Methods: In order to correct these issues, we cleaned the Melastomataceae probe set, extended it with additional sequences, and compared its performance with the original version. Results: The final probe set targets 396 putative nuclear loci represented by 6009 template sequences. The probe set has been made available, along with details on the cleaning process, for reproducibility. We show that the new probe set performs better than the original version in terms of sequence recovery. Discussion: This updated, extended, and cleaned probe set will improve the availability of phylogenomic resources across the Melastomataceae family. It is fully compatible with sequence recovery and extraction pipelines. The cleaning process can also be applied to any plant-targeting probe set that would need to be cleaned or updated if new genomic resources for the targeted taxa become available.