GSR: About Us

On September 15-16 2010, a trans-NIH workshop Next Generation Analytic Tools for Large Scale Genetic Epidemiology Studies of Complex Diseases was held to identify opportunities to foster research. Genetic simulation programs are often used to predict properties of populations retrospectively or prospectively according to mathematically intractable genetic models, and to assist the validation, statistical inference, and power analysis of a variety of statistical models. However, it is often a challenge to discover and select the right tool for a particular study due to differences in the type of genetic data of interest, simulation methods, evolutionary features, input and output formats, terminologies, and assumptions. Therefore, one of the recommendations from the workshop was to create a web-based catalog of simulation programs and data sets.

To address this need, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) created the Genetic Simulation Resources (GSR) website that aims to help researchers compare and choose the right simulation tools for their studies. This website maintains a catalogue of genetic simulators with links to webpages and searchable attributes.

The GSR team encourages all authors of genetic data simulators to register their packages in GSR and publish the official GSR tile with a link to the GSR site on their website.