Supermatrix - supertree analysis of the bee (Hymenoptera) phylogeny

Since the nineties, multiple papers dealing with the question of the phylogeny of bees (Hymenoptera, Anthophila) have been published by a limited number of research groups. Over the two last decades, the increasingly facilitated access to molecular data (gene sequences) has led to an accumulation of rather disparate molecular information notably gathered in the Genbank. A huge quantity of such information has been made available for the Apiformes too. Surprisingly there has been -so far- no attempt for using this information in a global scale reconstruction of the phylogeny of bees. The present work is based on a mining of the GenBank aiming at gathering the available Apiformes' sequences of the nuclear, mitochondrial and ribosomial genes into one single dataset. The sequences of twelve genes were downloaded and combined into a single supermatrix containing information for 1599 taxa. Sequences of the genes 16s, 18s, 28s (ribosomial domain) , COI, Cytb (mitochondrial domain) and ArgK, CAD, Ef1, LWR, NaK, PolII, Wnt (nuclear genes) were assembled. Alignments were realized with MAFFT 6 and combined using an installed version of Mesquite (large matrices build). Trees were computed using the CIPRES portal implementation of RAxML. Consense from the Phylip 3.66 package, also available on the CIPRES portal, was used for the consensus computations.