SOLAR is known as the old-school player in the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) mapping field (>2600 citations), which variance components or linear mixed models are implemented especially for the analysis of related individuals in pedigrees.
solarius
is an R package to interface SOLAR and to run its main models: polygenic, association and linkage.
| Model | SOLAR cmd | solarius
function | Input data format |
|-------|---------------|---------------------|-----------------------|
| Polygenic | polygenic | solarPolygenic | phen: R data.frame (ID/FA/MO pedigree-fields) |
| Linkage | multipoint | solarMultipoint | MIBD: SOLAR |
| Association | mga | solarAssoc | SNP: R matrix, SOLAR, PLINK (markers/imputed) |
The solarius
package also enables parallel computation of association / linkage
models to make genome-wide scans more efficient.
solarius
in BioinformaticsTo install the official release from CRAN:
install.packages("solarius")
To install the latest development version from source on GitHub (master branch):
library(devtools)
install_github("ugcd/solarius")
Note 1: Starting from version 3.*, solarius
is not supported for Windows.
DESCRIPTION file has a special line OS_type: unix
.
This is a clear limitation of the solarius
package that comes from the dependency on SOLAR.
See also the SOLAR FAQ
and the question 4 "Can SOLAR-Eclipse only be downloaded in the linux version?".
Note 2: The solarius
user needs to install and register SOLAR, that might be the most annoying part of the installation process.
Please see the Installation section of the tutorial vignette.
Please see the vignette minimal.html.
To cite the solarius
package in publications use:
Ziyatdinov et al., solarius: an R interface to SOLAR for variance
component analysis in pedigrees, Bioinformatics (2016)
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is:
@article{ziyatdinov2016solarius,
title = {solarius: an R interface to SOLAR for variance component analysis in pedigrees},
author = {Andrey Ziyatdinov and Helena Brunel and Angel Martinez-Perez and Alfonso Buil and Alexandre Perera and Jose Manuel Soria},
year = {2016},
publisher = {Oxford Univ Press},
journal = {Bioinformatics},
pages = {btw080},
url = {http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/12/1901},
}
The rationale behind the solarius
software:
SOLAR
has already automatedSOLAR
by system
R base function passing options/settings to SOLAR as parametersdata.frame
salamboR
artifacts (ancestor of solarius
)SOLAR
SOLAR
artifactsOn the SOLAR side:
On the R side:
Q1: I use GEMMA for my qtl mapping analysis. Are there any special reasons to switch to SOLAR / solarius
?
A1: That depends on the type of analysis. Some of the features SOLAR has and GEMMA does not:
solarius
package can be easily used to specify such models with the two random effects.solarius
can not help here and the only way is to deal with SOLAR tcl scripts, etc.Q2: I was wondering whether there was any support for user-defined omega functions, or any slightly more complicated variance components models (e.g. to allow different variance components for males and females, or to report results as variance components rather than proportions of variance)? If not, are there any plans to incorporate these in future?
A2: The solarius
package supports the three basic models: polygenic
, multipoint
and mga
commands of SOLAR.
In future versions of solarius
, we are not going to include any complex models. In this sence, solarius
is a partial port of SOLAR into R.
Also note that GxE tcl scripts are not publicly available. In our group, we did some specific analyses like GxE with custom tcl scripts (requested from the SOLAR authors).
Q3: When I tried to install the package, this was the message I got:
> install.packages(“solarius”)
Warning message:
package ‘solarius’ is not available (for R version 3.2.2)
Could you please let me know what I have done wrong and correct way to install the package?
A3: I suspect that you might have the Windows system, for which solarius
is not supported. That is because of SOLAR.
Please see the installation notes on http://ugcd.github.io/solarius/vignettes/tutorial.html#installation.
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