SIMHYB 2: a software tool to explore and illustrate evolutionary forces in Population Genetics teaching and research. Application to Conservation Genetics

Abstract

Practical approaches have become a standard in many scientific disciplines, including population genetics. By analyzing properly selected datasets, the students can calculate parameters and draw conclusions about genetic diversity, differentiation and evolution of populations with higher efficiency than if based exclusively on theoretical lessons. However, preparing the appropriate datasets is a hard task and a wrong selection can spoil a well-aimed practice. Here we present SIMHYB 2, a software tool specifically intended to ease the full understanding of evolutionary forces by the students and to help the teacher to prepare adequate datasets and examples for the practices. It simulates the course of a mixed population under user-defined reproductive and evolutionary conditions. Outputs can be easily adapted for downstream analysis with other popular tools as GENALEX or STRUCTURE. Thus, SIMHYB 2 is very suitable for project-based-learning approaches: students can produce their own datasets in different scenarios of genetic drift, migration, selective advantage, reproductive success, etc. Additionally, SIMHYB 2 is the only simulation software available to date providing traceable pedigrees of individuals, being therefore very convenient for preparing datasets for parentage analysis, spatial genetic structure or conservation genetics study cases. Satisfactory results from its ongoing utilization in higher education and research are reported.