Automated DNA sequencers and their accompanying software have tremendously increased throughput rates for large-scale genotyping. However, validating the quality of data still involves time-consuming manual intervention, imposing bottlenecks on throughput capacity. The program AlleloBin, written in C, automates the process of assigning allele sizes into their appropriate allele “bins” and checks whether the observed fragment sizes fit the expected allele sizes based on the microsatellite repeat length units (least-squares minimization algorithm of Idury & Cardon, Genome Research 7:1104-1109, 1997). We have extended the algorithm to allow for multiple selections of alleles so as to accommodate allelic data from both diploid & polyploid crop species. It generates useful summary statistics, a quality index for each marker, and checks for the presence of allelic drift. The program also produces a histogram for visual inspection of both the observed and the inferred allele sizes. The program can be freely downloaded from www.icrisat.org/gt-bt/biometrics.htm.

For further details contact :Abhishek Rathore