scoup: Simulate Codon Sequences with Darwinian Selection Incorporated as an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process

Genetic analyses of natural selection within and between populations have increasingly developed along separate paths. The two important genres of evolutionary biology (i.e. phylogenetics and population genetics) borne from the split can only benefit from research that seeks to bridge the gap. Simulation algorithms that combine fundamental concepts from both genres are important to achieve such unifying objective. We introduce scoup, a codon sequence simulator that is implemented in R and hosted on the Bioconductor platform. There is hardly any other simulator dedicated to genetic sequence generation for natural selection analyses on the platform. Concepts from the Halpern-Bruno mutation-selection model and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) evolutionary algorithm were creatively fused such that the end-product is a novelty with respect to computational genetic simulation. Users are able to seamlessly adjust the model parameters to mimic complex evolutionary procedures that may have been otherwise infeasible. For example, it is possible to explicitly interrogate the concepts of static and changing fitness landscapes with regards to Darwinian natural selection in the context of codon sequences from multiple populations.