PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Stephanie J. Spielman AU - Claus O. Wilke TI - Pyvolve: A Flexible Python Module for Simulating Sequences along Phylogenies AID - 10.1101/020214 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 020214 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/16/020214.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/16/020214.full AB - We introduce Pyvolve, a flexible Python module for simulating genetic data along a phylogeny according to continuous-time Markov models of sequence evolution. Pyvolve is easily incorporated into Python bioinformatics pipelines, and it can simulate sequences according most standard models of nucleotide, amino-acid, and codon sequence evolution. All model parameters are fully customizable. Users can additionally specify custom evolutionary models, with custom rate matrices and/or states to evolve. This flexibility makes Pyvolve a convenient framework not only for simulating sequences under a wide variety of conditions, but also for developing and testing new evolutionary models. Moreover, Pyvolve includes several novel sequence simulation features, including a new rate matrix scaling algorithm and branch-length perturbations. Pyvolve is an open-source project freely available, along with a detailed user-manual and example scripts, under a FreeBSD license from http://github.com/sjspielman/pyvolve.