This is a website about using ultraconserved elements (UCEs sensu Bejerano et al. 2004) for phylogenomic, phylogeographic, and population genetic studies. UCEs are an interesting class of genetic marker that solve the problem of trying to find an abundant, universal genetic marker that spans broad classes of organisms (tetrapods, fishes, etc.) while also being useful at different evolutionary time scales (millions of years to single generations).

The website is largely maintained by Brant Faircloth, with contributions from Mike Alfaro, Robb Brumfield, Nick Crawford, Travis Glenn, Mike Harvey, John McCormack, and Brian Smith.

We've been working with UCE data and developing enrichment techniques for UCE loci since 2008. Our first manuscript detailing the potential for UCEs to be a universal genomic marker was published online during 2011 in Genome Research after transiting the review process for more than one year.

As a group, we're committed to open-science and we attempt to post all of our manuscripts to arXiv as pre-prints, prior to publication. Additionally, all of the probe sets, protocols, etc. that we developed are available from this website for use and modification (under Creative Commons license) by other laboratories. We do not charge a user fee, we do not require users of these approaches to sign binding agreements, and we make no authorship claims relative to work derived from the protocols and probe sets that we post on this website.

If you have any questions or would like access to protocols in development, please find us on twitter @ultraconserved.