From the root to the tips: Building the Trichoptera tree of life

Separate efforts to gather molecular data for Trichoptera have resulted in a substantial amount of molecular information. In general, there is a small amount of data from many species and a large amount of data for a few species. These vary in size from an entire transcriptome (~1,400 genes, ~2 million bp) to the DNA barcode fragment (1 gene, 658 bp). The combination of these data has resulted in an unprecedented amount of information for Trichoptera and vastly improves our ability to decipher their tree of life. The difficulty arises when combining the results from these separate data sources to build a comprehensive trichopteran tree of life. I propose a method of building the tree from the base to the tips, using the taxa with transcriptomes first to build the backbone of the tree and adding taxa with less data to fill in the tips.