Izzy: a high-throughput metagenomic read simulator

TL;DR

Izzy is a high-throughput metagenomic read simulator that significantly accelerates the simulation process, enabling large-scale microbial community benchmarking with up to 60 times faster performance while remaining user-friendly.

Contribution

The paper introduces Izzy, a novel implementation that greatly improves simulation speed without sacrificing simplicity, addressing current bottlenecks in microbial community benchmarking.

Findings

Achieves up to 60x speedup over existing tools

Maintains simplicity and ease of use

Supports large-scale microbial community simulations

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.