The dataset consists of two file types. The first type consists of sets of orthologous gene sequences of the transient receptor potential (Trp) superfamily of genes in FASTA format. The sequence data were obtained from the Gene database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene), aligned at the codon level, and trimmed to a defined region present in each gene family member, termed the Trp box and C-terminal region. The sequences are grouped into files by gene and by taxonomic group. The second file type consists of phylogenetic tree files in Newick format that correspond with the taxa in the paired sequence file. Phylogenetic trees files in this format are often required for estimating the rate of evolution of a gene over an evolutionary period. The phylogenetic trees do not include or require branch lengths and were not generated from the Trp gene sequences themselves but from mitochondrial genome sequences or the literature as described herein. While the choice of genes, taxa, and tree labels were dictated by specific hypotheses for interpretive analysis, these files can be used for other purposes and modified accordingly. In addition to these two data components, there is also a descriptive file (list.of.accessions.txt) that links the taxon names in each sequence file to a permanent accession in the NCBI database from which the analyzed sequence was derived. The original accession identifiers were not used in the data files for readability and to maximize compatibility with different software packages that may not interpret special characters equivalently. Note the particular species for which the sequences were obtained are not germane to the analysis objectives, as long as they are representative of their taxonomic group and the sequences have low levels of missing data.