Περίληψη:
Software for the calculation of genetic linkage maps in experimental populations of diploid species
JoinMap is an MS-Windows ® program for the calculation of genetic linkage maps in experimental populations of diploid species. The software can deal with the common types of experimental population, including the full-sib family (F1) of a cross between two individuals of an outbreeding species. It provides high quality tools that allow detailed study of the experimental data. The intuitive user interface invites to a better exploration of the data. It is easy to perform various diagnostical tests, both before and after the actual map calculation. Subsequently, any locus or individual with possibly erroneous observations can be excluded from the calculations by a simple mouse-click, after which a new and improved map may be calculated.
This present version number 5 builds on its predecessor, v4.1. While preserving the user interface and workflow with the program on the whole, v5 has many enhancements over v4.1, several of which are quite significant. Most are intended as improvements for working with very large sets of genetic markers. In brief, the major technical improvements are: (a) the change towards 64-bit software, (b) the use of an embedded database system for storing all data, and (c) the parallelization of some calculations. The change to 64-bit allows access to more system memory, which is useful for very large datasets. Using an embedded database system greatly improves the responsiveness of the user interface with large datasets; due to the embedded property, the database system requires no special installation and usage instructions, everything is taken care of by the program. Finally, parallelization increases the computational speed on systems with a multi-core processor, of which all available computational cores can be utilized. In addition to these technical improvements, several aspects of the various algorithms and the user interface are enhanced. The important advances are described in the next section.