Interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs with Lorax.

Katte, Pratik; Corbett-Detig, Russell · Bioinformatics · 2026

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Abstract

Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) provide a comprehensive representation of genetic ancestry and underpin analyses of natural selection, disease association, and population history. However, existing visualization tools are limited in scalability and interactivity, making ARGs difficult to explore at biobank scale. We introduce Lorax, a GPU-accelerated, web-native platform for real-time visualization of population-scale ARGs. Lorax integrates genomic position, coalescent time, local genealogy, and metadata, enabling interactive exploration of ancestry and variant inheritance in biobank-scale datasets. Lorax is freely available as a live demo at lorax.ucsc.edu and as a Python package 'lorax-arg' on PyPI. The source code and documentation are available on GitHub at https://github.com/pratikkatte/lorax. Supplementary data is available at supplementary_material.docx.