Familias: Book, R version and Courses


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Familias and related software

Familias is a program for probability calculations when inferring paternity and identification based on DNA data. Please go to http://familias.no for free download of the program and documentation. An extended tutorial is available in English and Spanish. Lourdes Prieto Solla's blog parentela presents material relevant for Familias users in Spanish. The web page you are visiting now contains information on R Familias, Courses and the Book "Relationship Inference with Familias and R" by Egeland, Kling, and Mostad, available from Elsevier. The Familias program (and previously the pater program) was developed and maintained by Petter Mostad and Thore Egeland in the period 1994-2009. Since 2010 Familias has been extended in several directions (e.g., DVI (Disaster Victim Identification), familial searching, simulation, plotting) by the current developer Daniel Kling. Magnus Dehli Vigeland has developed QuickPed, a tool that provides a quick way to create pedigree plots, and for producing ped files describing pedigrees in text format. Familias does not do computations for linked markers; for such computations, you may consider FamLink or, for X-chromosomal markers FamLinkX, both implemented by Daniel Kling. Elias Hernandis has developed leapdna, a set of tools to help forensic geneticists access and convert DNA databases.

R software and Familias on other platforms

The R version of Familias, containing the core functionality of the windows version, was released in 2014 by Petter Mostad. This R version is used for plotting in Windows Familias and is also essential for Daniel Kling's software FamiliasPedigreeCreator, a simple tool to generate pedigree plots for multiple Familias projects at once. The R version of Familias will not be further developed. Rather we recommend Magnus Dehli Vigeland's ped suite for pedigree analysis including forensic applications. The methods and the software is presented in the book Pedigree Analysis in R (Vigeland, 2021). Familias runs on Linux/Debian as explained by Franco Marsico in this note. For a mac version, please check Elias Hernandis' guide Running Familias on MacOS.

Citing Familias

Updated 2021-08-06. You may send comments to thore.egeland@gmail.com