Tsbrowse: an interactive browser for Ancestral Recombination Graphs

Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) represent the interwoven paths of genetic ancestry for a set of recombining sequences. The ability to capture the evolutionary history of samples makes ARGs valuable in a wide range of applications in population and statistical genetics. ARG-based approaches are increasingly becoming a part of genetic data analysis pipelines due to breakthroughs enabling ARG inference at biobank-scale. However, there is a lack of visualisation tools, which are crucial for validating inferences and generating hypotheses. We present <monospace>tsbrowse</monospace> , an open-source Python web-app for the interactive visualisation of the fundamental building-blocks of ARGs, i.e., nodes, edges and mutations. We demonstrate the application of <monospace>tsbrowse</monospace> to various data sources and scenarios, and highlight its key features of browsability along the genome, user interactivity, and scalability to very large sample sizes.