A genome assembly for mule deer, <i>Odocoileus hemionus</i> , from Southern California

Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) is an ecologically and economically important cervid species that is widely distributed across western North America. Their broad range and use of diverse habitats, including those linked to historical glacial refugia, have made them an ideal model for studying the effects of climatic fluctuations and environmental heterogeneity on lineage diversification. The effects of this complex evolutionary history on the genome are further complicated by evidence of hybridization with other members of the genus, leading to extreme cases of mito-nuclear discordance. More recently, the influence of specific gene variants on disease dynamics, particularly the progression and morbidity of chronic wasting disease, has become an important topic of genomic research for this taxon. Here, we present and evaluate a new chromosome-level genome assembly of a representative mule deer from across the species' diverse range as part of the California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP). We assembled a genome de novo utilizing Pacific Biosciences HiFi long-read and Omni-C chromatin-proximity sequencing data. The assembly consisted of 814 scaffolds and 901 contigs representing a contig N50 of 46.68 Mb and scaffold N50 of 63.29 Mb. Lastly, our benchmarking universal single-copy ortholog (BUSCO) completeness score was 96.3%. This genome represents one of the most complete Odocoileus assemblies and will further our understanding of the comparative genomic architecture of cervids.