FrAnTK: a Frequency-based Analysis ToolKit for efficient exploration of allele sharing patterns in present-day and ancient genomic datasets

Abstract

Abstract Present-day and ancient population genomic studies from different study organisms have rapidly become accessible to diverse research groups worldwide. Unfortunately, as datasets and analyses become more complex, researchers with less computational experience often miss their chance to analyze their own data. We introduce FrAnTK, a user-friendly toolkit for computation and visualization of allele frequency-based statistics in ancient and present-day genome variation datasets. We provide fast, memory-efficient tools that allow the user to go from sequencing data to complex exploratory analyses and visual representations with minimal data manipulation. Its simple usage and low computational requirements make FrAnTK ideal for users that are less familiar with computer programming carrying out large-scale population studies.