Genie: an interactive real-time simulation for teaching genetic drift

Abstract

Neutral evolution is a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology but teaching this and other non-adaptive concepts is especially challenging. Here we present Genie, a browser-based educational tool that demonstrates population-genetic concepts such as genetic drift, population isolation, gene flow, and genetic mutation. Because it does not need to be downloaded and installed, Genie can scale to large groups of students and is useful for both in-person and online instruction. Genie was used to teach genetic drift to Evolution students at Arizona State University during Spring 2016 and Spring 2017. The effectiveness of Genie to teach key genetic drift concepts and misconceptions was assessed with the Genetic Drift Inventory developed by Price et al. (CBE Life Sci Educ 13(1):65–75, 2014). Overall, Genie performed comparably to that of traditional static methods across all evaluated classes. We have empirically demonstrated that Genie can be successfully integrated with traditional instruction to reduce misconceptions about genetic drift.

Toward the End-to-End Optimization of Particle Physics Instruments with Differentiable Programming: a White Paper

“…First of all, the developed pipeline should support a variety of simulation packages that are commonly used in various physics branches: e.g. GEANT4 [94], Pythia [327][328][329], Genie [330], to mention just a few. Each of the cited packages relies on other software components that should be pre-installed on the system to allow for its execution.…”