Quick Start

It will be assumed that msms is in the path. Thus, the command line starts with msms. If however this is not the case, you may need to prefix the command line with other java options and commands. We further assume no familiarity with ms. This page is only to get you started, please refer to the manual for more complete documentation, or the cheat sheet, which is also available in a plain html version.

We will start with a simple example and then explain each option in turn. Here, we consider a single diploid population.

This command tells msms to use an effective population size of 10000 with the -N option. This option is unique to msms and is important even when not considering selection. For now, its important to use a large number. While selection is not included in this parameter, it does not affect run times in any way.

The -ms 10 1000 option is the same as the first two options to ms. The first is the number of samples, the second is the number of replicates. After this option, all the normal options of ms can be used and has the same meanings as per ms.

The last option is -t 1 and specifies the theta parameter. We typically assume a diploid population so theta is 4*N*mutation rate. All parameters are scaled with N in some way.

Adding selection

We consider the case of a selective sweep. In this case, we have a time invariant model, that is the parameters and structure of the demographics don't change over time.

The -SAA option sets the selection strength for homozygotes and the -SaA sets the strength for heterozygotes. Note that because we use the -SF option the heterozygotes selection strength must be lower than the homozygotes, otherwise the forward simulation will never go to fixation and simply run forever. The selection strength is again scaled with 4Ns. The -SF 0 option tells the selection simulation to run until fixation and that fixation time is 0 time units into the past. Time is in 4N generations.

It is important to note that in order to use the -SF option that the forward simulation will go to fixation and that the model is time invariant. The program tries to detect when these conditions are not met, but this cannot be guaranteed.

Recombination

msms supports two models of recombination. An infinite sites model and a finite sites model where you can define number of sites. Regardless of what recombination model is used, the mutation model is by default always an infinite sites model.

In this example we use the finite sites model of recombination by giving the -r option 2 arguments. The first is the recombination rate scaled with 4N. The second is the number of "sites" per unit of sequence. If we want to use an infinite sites recombination we simply omit the last argument.