Resolving the phylogeny of Odonata with comprehensive genomic sampling

Dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) provide an excellent study system to investigate evolutionary questions of traits like insect flight and vision. Answering these questions requires a robust, well-supported phylogeny. While recent advances in molecular phylogenetic techniques have allowed the confident placement of many taxa in the Odonata phylogeny, some relationships still have little supporting evidence. Utilizing a target enrichment approach, we present a molecular phylogeny of Odonata with the most comprehensive gene and taxon sampling to date. We employ a set of up to 1,200 genes for 4,800 samples from 3,400 species, which represents more than half of all known species. This phylogeny provides additional support for relationships of recently erected families, such as those within the paraphyletic superfamily "Calopterygoidea". In addition, we present a pipeline for phylogenetic tree inference created with the Nextflow workflow management system, which enables biologists with little coding experience to easily and reproducibly create phylogenetic trees at any scale of sampling.