The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is important as a biomedical model given its unique features in immunity and metabolism. The current reference genome OryCun2.0 established with whole-genome shotgun sequencing was quite fragmented and had not been updated for ten years. In this work, we provided a new rabbit genome assembly UM_NZW_1.0 to improve OryCun2.0 by leveraging the contig lengths based on long-read sequencing and a wealth of available Illumina paired-end sequence data. UM_NZW_1.0 showed a remarkable increase of continuity compared with OryCun2.0, with 5 times longer contig N50 and approximately 75% gaps closed. Many of the closed gaps were overlapped with protein-coding genes or transcriptional features, resulting in an enhancement of gene annotations. In particular, UM_NZW_1.0 presented a more complete landscape of the MHC region and the IGH locus, therefore provided a valuable resource for future researches on rabbits.

欧洲兔（Oryctolagus cuniculus ）作为一种生物医学模型非常重要，因为它在免疫和新陈代谢方面具有独特的特征。目前用全基因组鸟枪法测序建立的参考基因组OryCun2.0相当碎片化，十年没有更新。在这项工作中，我们提供了一个新的兔子基因组组装 UM_NZW_1.0，通过利用contig来改进 OryCun2.0长度基于长读长测序和大量可用的 Illumina 双端序列数据。与 OryCun2.0 相比，UM_NZW_1.0 的连续性显着增加，contig N50 的长度增加了 5 倍，并且关闭了大约 75% 的间隙。许多封闭的间隙与蛋白质编码基因或转录特征重叠，导致基因注释的增强。特别是 UM_NZW_1.0 呈现了更完整的 MHC 区域和 IGH 基因座的景观，因此为未来的兔子研究提供了宝贵的资源。