Adding to the zoo

Today I had the pleasure to attend a workshop put together by the stdpopsim consortium. The primary goal of the group is the creation of a highly standardized set of population genetic simulation models to be used in a variety of research purposes (e.g. testing out new analysis methods, comparisons of historical results to more recently derived datasets, etc.). In the past, I have attended a workshop from the same group describing how to get started with using the basic functionality of stdpopsim. The focus of today’s workshop was a demonstration of how one might go about adding new species to the catalog, hence the title ‘Adding to the zoo’. The workshop was really fun, and I’m really impressed with both the elegance of the tool and the cohesive vision of the developers. I think there’s a good bit of work to do on my side to get the Daphnia magna genome into the catalog but I hope to be able to do it in the coming months.