![[RC_Link Logo]](images2/rc_link_logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Description
RC_Link is a tool for genetic linkage analysis. Genetic linkage analysis is a statistical method for ordering genes on a chromosome and determining the distance between them, and is very useful in predicting and detecting diseases and associating functions to genes.There are many genetic linkage analysis tools, most notably Fastlink, Linkage, GeneHunter, and Vitesse. A list of these along with many more is located at:
http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/soft/list.html
Many of these tools handle either large populations or many locations on the chromosome, but not both. A more recent tool called Superlink showed that by using Bayesian networks they were able to model this domain and solve many problems which previous state-of-the-art tools were unable to handle.
RC_Link similarly models the genetic linkage analysis problem as a Bayesian network, and then simplifies the network and computes the results using the Recursive Conditioning algorithm. These techniques allow RC_Link to be one of the fastest tools for solving many genetic linkage analysis problems.
Download
The current version of the program is version 2.0.Program Input
The command line parameters and input file formats are described in the user manual.Results
Results comparing RC_Link to Superlink version 1.5 (pdf)(html).Sample Input Files
Here is a sample locus file and a sample pedigree file, from the suite of networks provided by Superlink(these are also included when downloading RC_Link).
Additionally, here is a zip file with those networks with which we compared the two tools (they are also publically available on Superlink's website).