Editor’s Assessment

The Brown-Spotted Pit viper Protobothrops mucrosquamatus, also known as the Chinese habu, is a widespread and highly venomous snake distributed from from NE India to Eastern China. To help better understand the evolution of pit vipers, a 1.53 Gb reference genome was sequenced, assembled and described in this work. During review some inconsistencies the metrics were fixed. This data can be combined with already published and upcoming snake genome data to construct the evolutionary history of snakes and other reptiles as well as the genetic basis of snake venom.