About

Aevol is a forward-in-time evolutionary simulator that simulates the evolution of a population of haploid organisms through a process of variation and selection. The design of the model focuses on the realism of the genome structure and of the mutational process. Aevol can therefore be used to decipher the effect of chromosomal rearrangements on genome evolution, including their interactions with other types of mutational events.

In short, Aevol is made of three components:

• A mapping that decodes the genomic sequence of an individual into a phenotype and computes the corresponding fitness value.
• A population of organisms, each owning a genome, hence its own phenotype and fitness. At each generation, the organisms compete to populate the next generation.
• A genome replication process during which genomes can undergo several kinds of mutational events, including chromosomal rearrangements and local mutations. The seven modelled types of mutation entail 3 local mutations: substitutions, small insertion, small deletion, 2 balanced rearrangements (which conserve the genome size): inversions and translocations, and 2 unbalanced rearrangements: duplications and deletions. This allows the user to study the effect of chromosomal rearrangements and their interaction with other kinds of events such as substitutions and InDels.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.