A reference assembly for the legume Vicia villosa

Vicia villosa is an incompletely domesticated annual legume of the Fabaceae family native to Europe and Western Asia. V. villosa is widely used as a cover crop in the United States Midwest due to an ability to withstand harsh winters. The highly heterozygous nature of the V. villosa assembly precluded prior genome assembly using short-reads, leaving this species without suitable genomic resources for genetic selection. A reference-quality genome assembly was prepared from low error rate long sequence reads to improve genetic-based trait selection of this species. This reference genome assembly was further filtered for duplicate sequences and was scaffolded using Hi-C reads to provide the first contiguous assembly for the species.