Report from the R Hackathon for population genetics

Last week Sara and I had the pleasure of attending the R Hackathon for population genetics at NESCent. We had the opportunity to meet the developers of adegenet (Thibaut Jombart), hierfstat (Jerome Goudet), poppr (Zhian N. Kamvar and Niklaus J. Grünwald), strataG (Eric Archer), and rmetasim (Allan Strand), as well as ape, pegas, and coalescentMCMC (Emmanuel Paradis).

Everyone had the opportunity to submit pitches and then people chose which ideas they wanted to work on. We separated into focus groups that worked on:

1) Coding vignettes for Ne methods in R

2) Integration of packages and classes for population genetic data in R (including fast reading of vcf files!)

3) Identification of multivariate outliers in genome scans (MINOTAUR package under development)

4) Development of a vignette/package on "How to do simulations for population genetics in R"

5) And most exciting, development of a wiki page of Resources for Population Genetics in R - for users and developers!