Introduction
Verbascum thapsus, or the Common Mullein, is a biennial plant that can grow to 2 m tall or more. Its small, yellow flowers are densely grouped on a tall stem, which grows from a large rosette of leaves. It grows in a wide variety of habitats but prefers well-lit areas and can grow from long-lived seeds that persist in the soil. It is a common weedy plant that spreads by prolifically producing seeds and has become invasive in temperate world regions.
Methods
A single wild-collected specimen was used for sequencing. DNA extraction was performed using the Qiagen DNAeasy genomic extraction kit using the standard process. A paired-end sequencing library was constructed using the Illumina TruSeq kit according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The library was sequenced on an Illumina Hi-Seq platform in paired-end, 2 × 150 bp format. The resulting fastq files were trimmed of adapter/primer sequences and low-quality regions with Trimmomatic v0.33 (Bolger, Lohse, and Usadel 2014). The trimmed sequence was assembled by SPAdes v2.5 (Bankevich et al. 2012) followed by a finishing step using Zanfona v1.0 (Kieras 2021) to make additional contig joins based on conserved regions in related species.
Results
The genome assembly yielded a total sequence length of 560,917,718 bp.
Data availability
Raw and assembled data are publicly available via GenBank.
Raw genome data
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/?term=SRR18183247
Assembled genome
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/JAOXOC000000000
Funding
Funding was provided by Iridian Genomes, grant# IRGEN_RG_2021-1345. Hassan Ghazal is a US NIH grant recipient through the H3abionet/H3africa consortium U24HG006941.