Prairie
+ meadow
vole genomes
Prairie voles are central to the study of pair bonding, but their genome remained incomplete. We built the first near-complete, chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved reference from a single combined HiFi‑CiFi library and sequencing run, recovering the full karyotype and resolving the prairie-specific Avpr1a duplication.
For decades, the prairie vole has been central to research on pair bonding, parental care, and social attachment. But the genome behind that work remained incomplete. More than 600 Mb of sequence was unplaced, the Y chromosome was missing, and neither Avpr1a paralog was resolved.
Here we release the first near-complete, chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved prairie vole reference. It recovers the complete karyotype, including X and Y, and anchors more than 600 Mb of previously unplaced sequence to chromosomes. It also resolves the prairie-vole-specific Avpr1a duplication in its full chromosome context. Set against the meadow vole, the two Y chromosomes align almost nowhere.
One library and one sequencing run per species produced all of it, combining HiFi and CiFi reads. The phased assemblies, annotations, and browser tracks are below.