fastsimcoal: a continuous-time coalescent simulator of genomic diversity under arbitrarily complex evolutionary scenarios

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Abstract
Motivation: Genetic studies focus on increasingly larger genomic regions of both extant and ancient DNA, and there is a need for simulation software to match these technological advances. We present here a new coalescent-based simulation program fastsimcoal, which is able to quickly simulate a variety of genetic markers scattered over very long genomic regions with arbitrary recombination patterns under complex evolutionary scenarios. Availability and Implementation: fastsimcoal is a C++ program compiled for Windows, MacOsX and Linux platforms. It is freely available at cmpg.unibe.ch/software/fastsimcoal/, together with its detailed user manual and example input files. Contact:laurent.excoffier@iee.unibe.ch Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.