Mixtum: a graphical tool for two-way admixture analysis in population genetics based on f-statistics.

Abstract

Mixtum is a Python-based code that estimates ancestry contributions in a process of two-way admixture based on bi-allelic genotype data. The outcomes of Mixtum come from the geometric interpretation of the f-statistics formalism. Designed with user-friendliness as a priority, Mixtum allows to interactively handle a menu of user-supplied populations to build different mixture models in conjunction with the set of auxiliary populations required by the framework. The results are presented graphically and numerically. Importantly, Mixtum provides a novel index (an angle) that assesses the quality of the ancestral reconstruction of the model under scrutiny. The use and interpretation of the outcomes of Mixtum are explained and illustrated with case studies. The open source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/jmcastelo/mixtum and on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17789375. Mixtum is implemented in Python and runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.