Cervus

Cervus is a lightweight Windows application whose purpose is to help you with analyzing genetic data from co-dominant genetic markers like microsatellites (STRs) and SNPs.

It is able to perform the following types of analyses: allele frequencies, simulation of parentage, parentage testing, as well as identity. You can apply several parentage analysis modes, which may be related to paternity, maternity or parent pair.

Before importing any genetic data for further analysis, you should know that Cervus is able to help you only if the species are diploid, markers are autosomal and co-dominant, markers are in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, and pairs of markers are in linkage equilibrium. Plus, markers should not carry null alleles.

You can import data from CSV or plain text file format in order to make the tool process data about genotype, allele frequency, offspring and candidate parent.

The utility is able to reveal a summary of each analysis which can be exported to plain text file format. It shows details about the allele frequency analysis and data, simulation summary, distribution and histogram, parentage analysis, as well as identity analysis.

Cervus allows you to keep track of all the details that you enter in your analysis with the aid of projects, which can be saved to a file on your computer, so you can easily restore data in the future. The utility comes with support for several demo files that you can use for understanding how the program works.

Several configuration settings help you automatically open the last project at startup, preview input files, display the run time and play sound notifications at the end of each analysis, as well as customize the menu and toolbar.

Cervus gives you the possibility to convert text files to different operating systems compatible formats, such as Unix and Mac. You may convert genotype files to or from Cervus format, more specifically Genepop, Genetix, Kinship and Kingroup files.

All things considered, Cervus integrates a useful set of analysis methods for assigning parentage via genetic markers, and is suitable especially for scientists.

NOTE: Free for non-commercial use only.