FamLink is developed by Daniel Kling at Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Norway, together with Thore Egeland at Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Norway, and Andreas Tillmar at National Board of Forensic Medicine, Sweden. See further contact details here.
The software provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface, which allows for linkage calculation based on the Lander-Green algorithm. FamLink uses the Merlin engine (Abecasis et al., Nat. Genet., 2002) for numerical calculations. Merlin, as several simillar programs, is based on the Lander-Green algorithm. This algorithm is computionally linear in the number of markers, but not in the complexity of the pedigree. However, we have found that fairly complex pedigrees can be handled and we have not encountered practical cases where computation time has been a serious problem. In fact, FamLink improves on software we are familliar with (such as Familias) when it comes to computation time and dealing with inbreeding and marriage loops. FamLink cannot presently accommodate kinship (theta) corrections nor mutations. It is, however, possible to model genotyping error whereby the true allele is recorded as a randomly chosen allele with a specified probability.
Download the software and use the getting started example and the manual to start using FamLink. If you need help in any way, please contact us.
Kling D, Egeland T, Tillmar AO (2012) FamLink-a user friendly software for linkage calculations in family genetics. Forensic Sci Int Genet. 6(5):616-620.
Last updated March, 2013
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