%0 Journal Article %A Aleksi Sipola %A Pekka Marttinen %A Jukka Corander %T Bacmeta: simulation for genomic evolution in bacterial metapopulations %D 2017 %R 10.1101/175257 %J bioRxiv %P 175257 %X The advent of genomic data from densely sampled bacterial populations has created a need for flexible simulators by which models and hypotheses can be efficiently investigated in the light of empirical observations. Bacmeta provides fast stochastic simulation of neutral evolution within a large collection of interconnected bacterial populations with completely adjustable connectivity network. Stochastic events of mutations, recombinations, insertions/deletions, migrations and microepidemics can be simulated in discrete non-overlapping generations with a Wright-Fisher model that operates on explicit sequence data of any desired genome length. Each model component, including locus, bacterial strain, population, and ultimately the whole metapopulation, is efficiently simulated using C++ objects, and detailed metadata from each level of the simulation can be acquired. The software can be executed in a cluster environment using simple textual input files, enabling, e.g., large-scale simulations and likelihood-free inference. Bacmeta is implemented with C++ for Linux, Mac and Windows. It is available at https://bitbucket.org/aleksisipola/bacmeta under the BSD 3-clause license.Contact aleksi.sipola{at}helsinki.fi,jukka.corander{at}medisin.uio.noSupplementary information Supplementary data are available online at bioRxiv. %U https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/08/11/175257.full.pdf