One hundred new universal exonic markers for birds developed from a genomic pipeline

The functional constraint imposed on exonic sequences increases marker universality and improves sequence alignment accuracy, yet introns have been favoured recently in Avian Tree of Life studies because of the increased sequence coverage that would be required to yield similar resolving power with exons. In this study, we address this shortcoming by developing a pipeline to identify a large number of exonic markers from five avian genomes. Markers were targeted to maximize phylogenetic informativeness and to exclude multi-copy genes. We demonstrate the universality of these markers by testing a portion of them on a taxonomically diverse assemblage of avian specimens.