# A reference-grade genome assembly data of sika deer in Hokkaido, Japan, Cervus nippon yesoensis

## TL;DR

This paper presents a high-quality genome assembly for the sika deer subspecies Cervus nippon yesoensis, which is larger and more complete than previous assemblies.

## Contribution

The study provides a new, high-quality de novo genome assembly for Cervus nippon yesoensis using HiFi sequencing.

## Key findings

- The genome assembly CerNipYes1.0 has a size of 3.1 Gb, larger than previously reported sika deer genomes.
- The assembly achieved a scaffold N50 of 77 Mb and 99.75% completeness based on BUSCO analysis.

## Abstract

Sika deer (Cervus nippon) is naturally distributed across East Asia and includes 14 subspecies, showing phenotypic and genetic diversity. In this study, we constructed a de novo genome assembly of wild sika deer using one of the largest subspecies, C. n. yesoensis. We used HiFi, high quality long-read based on Pacific Bioscience to assemble our novel genome assembly CerNipYes1.0. The genome size of CerNipYes1.0 is estimated to be 3.1Gb, which is 0.6Gb larger than the other genome assembly of sika deer previously reported. The number of scaffolds is 1,810 and N50 length achieved 77Mb. Compleasm, a genome completeness evaluation tool based on Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) indicated that 12,562 (99.75%) genes are completed as genes with comparing to database. Our results indicate that CerNipYes1.0 is valuable to study the molecular biology, phylogeny and evolution of the Cervidae and its genome.