Izzy: a high-throughput metagenomic read simulator

Abstract

Simulated microbial communities are used in benchmarking microbial abundance estimators and other bioinformatic utilities. To match current data scales, large simulated samples are needed, and many. The speed of current implementations might create bottlenecks for scientists testing new innovations. Here, a new implementation is introduced, based on existing error models. The new implementation, Izzy, provides up to a 60x speedup while maintaining a simple and easy-to-use interface.