sgnesR: An R package for simulating gene expression data from an underlying real gene network structure considering delay parameters

BACKGROUND: sgnesR (Stochastic Gene Network Expression Simulator in R) is an R package that provides an interface to simulate gene expression data from a given gene network using the stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA). The package allows various options for delay parameters and can easily included in reactions for promoter delay, RNA delay and Protein delay. A user can tune these parameters to model various types of reactions within a cell. As examples, we present two network models to generate expression profiles. We also demonstrated the inference of networks and the evaluation of association measure of edge and non-edge components from the generated expression profiles. RESULTS: The purpose of sgnesR is to enable an easy to use and a quick implementation for generating realistic gene expression data from biologically relevant networks that can be user selected. CONCLUSIONS: sgnesR is freely available for academic use. The R package has been tested for R 3.2.0 under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-017-1731-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.