genomalicious: serving up a smorgasbord of R functions for population genomic analyses

Turning SNP data into biologically meaningful results requires considerable computational acrobatics, including importing, exporting, and manipulating data among different analytical packages and programming environments, and finding ways to visualise results for data exploration and presentation. I present GENOMALICIOUS, an R package designed to provide a selection of functions for population genomicists to simply, intuitively, and flexibly, guide SNP data through their analytical pipelines, within and outside R. At the core of the original GENOMALICIOUS workflow is the conversion of genomic variant data into a data.table object. This provides a useful way of storing large amounts of data in an intuitive format that can be easily manipulated using methods unique to this object class. Over time, GENOMALICIOUS has grown to cater to a range of analyses in population structure and demography, adaptive evolution, quantitative traits, and phylogenetics. Researchers using pooled allele frequencies, or individually sequenced genotypes, are sure to find functions that accommodate their tastes in GENOMALICIOUS. The simplicity and accessibility of pipelines in GENOMALICIOUS may also serve as a useful tool for teaching basic population genetics and genomics in an R environment. The source code and a series of tutorials for this package are freely available on GitHub