Tsbrowse: an interactive browser for ancestral recombination graphs

Journal article

Summary: Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) represent the interwoven paths of genetic ancestry of a set of recombining sequences. The ability to capture the evolutionary history of samples makes ARGs valuable in a wide range of applications in population and statistical genetics. ARG-based approaches are increasingly becoming a part of genetic data analysis pipelines due to breakthroughs enabling ARG inference at biobank-scale. However, there is a lack of visualization tools, which are crucial for validating inferences and generating hypotheses. We present tsbrowse, an open-source, web-based Python application for the interactive visualization of the fundamental building blocks of ARGs, i.e. nodes, edges and mutations. We demonstrate the application of tsbrowse to various data sources and scenarios, and highlight its key features of browsability along the genome, user interactivity, and scalability to very large sample sizes. Availability and implementation: Tsbrowse is installed as a Python package from PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/tsbrowse/), while a development version is maintained at https://github.com/tskit-dev/tsbrowse. Documentation is available at https://tskit.dev/tsbrowse/docs/. Source code is archived on Zenodo with DOI, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15683039.

Authors: Karthikeyan, S; Jeffery, B; Mbuli-Robertson, D; Kelleher, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Bioinformatics
• Volume: 41
• Issue: 8
• Article number: btaf393
• Publication date: 2025-07-12
• Acceptance date: 2025-07-08
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf393
• EISSN: 1367-4811
• Language: English