solarius: an R interface to SOLAR for variance component analysis in pedigrees

Summary The open source environment R is one of the most widely used software for statistical computing. It provides a variety of applications including statistical genetics. Most of the powerful tools for quantitative genetic analyses are stand-alone free programs developed by researchers in academia. SOLAR is the standard software program to perform linkage and association mappings of the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in pedigrees of arbitrary size and complexity. solarius allows the user to exploit the variance component methods implemented in SOLAR. It automates such routine operations as formatting pedigree and phenotype data. It also parses the model output and contains summary and plotting functions for exploration of the results. In addition, solarius enables parallel computing of the linkage and association analyses, that makes the calculation of genome-wide scans more efficient. Availability and implementation solarius is available on CRAN https://cran.r-project.org/package=solarius and on GitHub https://github.com/ugcd/solarius . See http://solar.txbiomedgenetics.org/ for more information about SOLAR. Contact [email protected]