The Research Problem

My honours thesis explored the use of in-silico simulations of genetic networks to understand polygenic trait adaptation. As part of this research, I had to determine a way for SLiM (the genetic simulation software my lab was using) to integrate with R (the statistical coding language), so that complex integrals that describe polygenic trait inheritance could be solved throughout the simulations.

This had not been previously achieved in such a way that allowed for the passing of information between SLiM and R within generations, and also allowed for the use of HPC clusters to run these simulations. This project involved extensive research and testing of different approaches to achieve this integration, and I have documented the approaches I took and the outcomes of these approaches in a readme file in the repository for this project, which can be found here.