The explosion in population genomic data demands ever more complex modes of analysis, and increasingly these analyses depend on sophisticated simulations. Re-cent advances in population genetic simulation have made it possible to simulate large and complex models, but specifying such models for a particular simulation engine remains a difficult and error-prone task. Computational genetics researchers currently re-implement simulation models independently, leading to inconsistency and duplication of effort. This situation presents a major barrier to empirical researchers seeking to use simulations for power analyses of upcoming studies or sanity checks on existing genomic data. Population genetics, as a field, also lacks standard benchmarks by which new tools for inference might be measured. Here we describe a new resource, stdpopsim, that attempts to rectify this situation. Stdpopsim is a community-driven open source project, which provides easy access to a growing catalog of published simulation models from a range of organisms and supports multiple simulation engine backends. This resource is available as a well-documented python library with a simple command-line interface. We share some examples demonstrating how stdpopsim can be used to systematically compare demographic inference methods, and we encourage a broader community of developers to contribute to this growing resource.

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The distribution of mutational effects on fitness is central to evolutionary genetics. Typical univariate distributions, however, cannot model the effects of multiple mutations at the same site, so we introduce a model in which mutations at the same site have correlated fitness effects. To infer the strength of that correlation, we developed a diffusion approximation to the triallelic frequency spectrum, which we applied to data from Drosophila melanogaster. We found a moderate positive correlation between the fitness effects of nonsynonymous mutations at the same codon, suggesting that both mutation identity and location are important for determining fitness effects in proteins. We validated our approach by comparing it to biochemical mutational scanning experiments, finding strong quantitative agreement, even between different organisms. We also found that the correlation of mutational fitness effects was not affected by protein solvent exposure or structural disorder. Together, our results suggest that the correlation of fitness effects at the same site is a previously overlooked yet fundamental property of protein evolution.KEYWORDS diffusion approximation; distribution of fitness effects; Drosophila melanogaster; nonsynonymous mutations; triallelic sites M UTATIONS create genetic variation within populations, some of which causes differential fitness among individuals upon which natural selection operates. The effects of mutations on fitness range from strongly deleterious to strongly beneficial, and the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) is key for many problems in genetics, from the evolution of sex (Barton and Charlesworth 1998) to the architecture of human disease (Di Rienzo 2006). For protein-coding regions, there are generally many strongly deleterious or lethal mutations, a similar number of moderately deleterious or nearly neutral mutations, and a small number of beneficial mutations . The DFE may be determined experimentally through direct measurements of mutation fitness effects in clonal populations of viruses, bacteria, or yeast (Wloch et al. 2001;Sanjuán et al. 2004), and recent studies have provided high-resolution DFEs for single genes (Bank et al. 2014; and for beneficial mutations (Levy et al. 2015). The DFE may also be inferred from comparative (Nielsen and Yang 2003;Tamuri et al. 2012) or population genetic (Williamson et al. 2005;Eyre-Walker et al. 2006; Keightley and EyreWalker 2007;Boyko et al. 2008) data, although these approaches have little power for strongly deleterious mutations.In the typical population genetic approach for estimating the DFE, the population demography is first inferred using a putatively neutral class of mutations, and the DFE for another class of mutations is inferred by modeling the distribution of allele frequencies expected under a model of demography plus selection. Most population genetic inference has focused on biallelic loci, for which the ancestral allele and a single mutant (derived) allele are segregating in the population. When many indi...

The effect of a mutation on fitness may differ between populations depending on environmental and genetic context, but little is known about the factors that underlie such differences. To quantify genome-wide correlations in mutation fitness effects, we developed a novel concept called a joint distribution of fitness effects (DFE) between populations. We then proposed a new statistic w to measure the DFE correlation between populations. Using simulation, we showed that inferring the DFE correlation from the joint allele frequency spectrum is statistically precise and robust. Using population genomic data, we inferred DFE correlations of populations in humans, Drosophila melanogaster, and wild tomatoes. In these species, we found that the overall correlation of the joint DFE was inversely related to genetic differentiation. In humans and D. melanogaster, deleterious mutations had a lower DFE correlation than tolerated mutations, indicating a complex joint DFE. Altogether, the DFE correlation can be reliably inferred, and it offers extensive insight into the genetics of population divergence.

Understanding the demographic history of populations is a key goal in population genetics, and with improving methods and data, ever more complex models are being proposed and tested. Demographic models of current interest typically consist of a set of discrete populations, their sizes and growth rates, and continuous and pulse migrations between those populations over a number of epochs, which can require dozens of parameters to fully describe. There is currently no standard format to define such models, significantly hampering progress in the field. In particular, the important task of translating the model descriptions in published work into input suitable for population genetic simulators is labor intensive and error prone. We propose the Demes data model and file format, built on widely used technologies, to alleviate these issues. Demes provides a well-defined and unambiguous model of populations and their properties that is straightforward to implement in software, and a text file format that is designed for simplicity and clarity. We provide thoroughly tested implementations of Demes parsers in multiple languages including Python and C, and showcase initial support in several simulators and inference methods. An introduction to the file format and a detailed specification are available at https://popsim-consortium.github.io/demes-spec-docs/.