M&Ms: A software for building realistic Microbial Mock communities

Motivation: Advances in sequencing technologies have triggered the development of many bioinformatic tools aimed to analyze these data. As these tools need to be tested, it is important to simulate datasets that resemble realistic conditions. Although there is a large amount of software dedicated to produce reads from in silico microbial communities, often the simulated data diverge widely from real situations. Results: Here, we introduce M&Ms, a user-friendly open-source bioinformatic tool to produce realistic amplicon datasets from reference sequences, based on pragmatic ecological parameters. This tool creates sequence libraries for in silico microbial communities with user-controlled richness, evenness, microdiversity, and source environment. M&Ms allows the user to generate simple to complex read datasets based on real parameters that can be used in developing bioinformatic software or in benchmarking current tools. M&Ms also provides additional figures and files with extensive details on how each synthetic community is composed, so that users can make informed choices when designing their benchmarking pipelines. Availability: The source code of M&Ms is freely available from https://github.com/ggnatalia/MMs