Authors: Karl W Broman and Hao Wu, with ideas from Gary Churchill and Śaunak Sen and contributions from Danny Arends, Robert Corty, Timothée Flutre, Ritsert Jansen, Pjotr Prins, Lars Rönnegård, Rohan Shah, Laura Shannon, Quoc Tran, Aaron Wolen, and Brian Yandell
R/qtl is an extensible, interactive environment for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) in experimental crosses. It is implemented as an add-on package for the freely available and widely used statistical language/software R. The development of this software as an add-on to R allows us to take advantage of the basic mathematical and statistical functions, and powerful graphics capabilities, that are provided with R. Further, the user will benefit by the seamless integration of the QTL mapping software into a general statistical analysis program. Our goal is to make complex QTL mapping methods widely accessible and allow users to focus on modeling rather than computing.
A key component of computational methods for QTL mapping is the hidden Markov model (HMM) technology for dealing with missing genotype data. We have implemented the main HMM algorithms, with allowance for the presence of genotyping errors, for backcrosses, intercrosses, and phase-known four-way crosses.
The current version of R/qtl includes facilities for estimating genetic maps, identifying genotyping errors, and performing single-QTL genome scans and two-QTL, two-dimensional genome scans, by interval mapping (with the EM algorithm), Haley-Knott regression, and multiple imputation. All of this may be done in the presence of covariates (such as sex, age or treatment). One may also fit higher-order QTL models by multiple imputation and Haley-Knott regression.
The R/qtl package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
A copy of the GNU General Public License, version 3, is available at https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/GPL-3