title: IgSimulator: a versatile immunosequencing simulator.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The recent introduction of next-generation sequencing technologies to antibody studies have resulted in a growing number of immunoinformatics tools for antibody repertoire analysis. However, benchmarking these newly emerging tools remains problematic since the gold standard datasets that are needed to validate these tools are typically not available.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Since simulating antibody repertoires is often the only feasible way to benchmark new immunoinformatics tools, we developed the IgSimulator tool that addresses various complications in generating realistic antibody repertoires. IgSimulator's code has modular structure and can be easily adapted to new requirements to simulation.
  
  
  METHODS
  IgSimulator is open source and freely available as a C++ and Python program running on all Unix-compatible platforms. The source code is available from yana-safonova.github.io/ig_simulator.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  safonova.yana@gmail.com
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
authors.affiliation: Center of Algorithmic biotechnology, Institute of Translational Biomedicine, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, Algorithmic Biology Laboratory, St. Petersburg Academic University, St. Petersburg, Russia and.
authors.forename: Yana
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Safonova
authors.affiliation: Center of Algorithmic biotechnology, Institute of Translational Biomedicine, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, Algorithmic Biology Laboratory, St. Petersburg Academic University, St. Petersburg, Russia and.
authors.forename: Alla
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lapidus
authors.affiliation: Department of Protein Chemistry, Genentech, 1 DNA Way, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA.
authors.forename: Jennie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lill
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000906:Antibodies / Q000235:genetics*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D016208:Databases, Factual; D015894:Genome, Human; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D000906:Antibodies