py_ped_sim - A flexible forward genetic simulator for complex family pedigree analysis.

Background: Large-scale family pedigrees are commonly used across medical, evolutionary, and forensic genetics. These pedigrees are tools for identifying genetic disorders, tracking evolutionary patterns, and establishing familial relationships via forensic genetic identification. However, there is a lack of software to accurately simulate different pedigree structures along with genomes corresponding to those individuals in a family pedigree. This limits simulation-based evaluations of methods that use pedigrees.

Results: We have developed a python command-line-based tool called py_ped_sim that facilitates the simulation of pedigree structures and the genomes of individuals in a pedigree. py_ped_sim represents pedigrees as directed acyclic graphs, enabling conversion between standard pedigree formats and integration with the forward population genetic simulator, SLiM. Notably, py_ped_sim allows the simulation of varying numbers of offspring for a set of parents, with the capacity to shift the distribution of sibship sizes over generations. We additionally add simulations for events of misattributed paternity, which offers a way to simulate half-sibling relationships. We validated the accuracy of our software by simulating genomes onto diverse family pedigree structures, showing that the estimated kinship coefficients closely approximated expected values.

Conclusions: py_ped_sim is a user-friendly and open-source solution for simulating pedigree structures and conducting pedigree genome simulations. It empowers medical, forensic, and evolutionary genetics researchers to gain deeper insights into the dynamics of genetic inheritance and relatedness within families.