Discoal: flexible coalescent simulations with selection

Here we describe discoal, a coalescent simulator able to generate population samples that include selective sweeps in a feature-rich, flexible manner. discoal can perform simulations conditioning on the fixation of an allele due to drift or either hard or soft sweeps-even those occurring a large genetic distance away from the simulated locus. discoal can simulate sweeps with recurrent mutation to the adaptive allele, recombination, and gene conversion, under non-equilibrium demographic histories and without specifying an allele frequency trajectory in advance.