Welcome

Gene Stacker is a flexible open source tool for marker-assisted gene pyramiding. It can be used to construct efficient crossing schedules that gather desired alleles residing in multiple individuals into a single, specific target genotype (the so-called ideotype).

Given a set of initial (phase-known) genotypes, the desired ideotype and the genetic map, Gene Stacker approximates the Pareto frontier of crossing schedules that create the ideotype with a minimal number of generations, population size and linkage phase ambiguity. A wide range of heuristics are provided which yield different tradeoffs between solution quality and execution time and allow to solve complex stacking problems within reasonable time.

References

De Beukelaer H, De Meyer G, Fack V.
BMC Genetics 2015; 16:2. doi:10.1186/s12863-014-0154-z.

Source code

The source code of Gene Stacker is freely available at GitHub. Note that the latest source code snapshot is not guaranteed to be stable, for stable releases please visit the download page.

Versions

Releases of new versions of Gene Stacker are announced below. Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay informed.

Version 1.9 (28 August 2015)

• Various bug fixes.

Version 1.8 (21 January 2015)

• Fixed wrong overall LPA when targeting several duplicates of plants with a non-zero LPA.

Version 1.7 (06 January 2015)

• Default colored output graphs. A new command line option -nc,--no-color is provided to produce greyscale graphs. Note: it is advised to install the latest version of Graphviz if colored graphs are not rendered correctly.

Version 1.6 (10 September 2014)

• Crossings and plants are no longer explicitely duplicated. Instead, if a crossing needs to be performed multiple times to generate a sufficient amount of seeds, or if a plant needs to be grown several times to be able to perform all scheduled crossings, this is indicated in the labels of the corresponding nodes in the crossing schedule. Population sizes are still computed so that the required number of duplicates of the target plants are expected among the offspring.
• Heuristic H3 now allows selfing of genotypes which are homozygous at all target loci, in order to reproduce such genotype in the next generation. This exception has been introduced because such selfings allow crossing with the respective genotype over multiple generations at low cost. This change may result in better schedules when using presets default, faster or fastest and the corresponding increase in runtime is negligibly small.
• Heuristic H6 now computes a tighter population size bound. May result in speedups when using presets default, faster or fastest.
• Fixed bug in joint population size computation when simultaneously targeting different phase-known genotypes with the same observed allelic frequencies.
• Fixed bug in alignment of partial schedules because of which some alignments were sometimes not considered.
• Cleaned up Javadoc in source code.

Version 1.5 (17 March 2014)

• Added and refactored several command line options:
• Option -help prints brief usage information, including an overview of all parameters.
• Option -version outputs the version of the Gene Stacker software.
• Options -v,--verbose, -vv,--very-verbose and -debug allow finer control of the amount of console output.
• When -int,--intermediate-output is enabled, an intermediate ZIP package will be created and updated whenever the current Pareto frontier has changed, containing all constructed schedules which are currently not dominated by any other (constructed) schedule. This option may be useful to obtain intermediate results, but is expected to slow down the application.
• Redesigned command line messages:
• By default, less output is printed than before.
• More verbosity options to increase amount of output (see above).
• An explicit alert is printed when the runtime limit has been exceeded.
• Improved parallel extension of partial schedules.

Version 1.4 (06 December 2013)

• Population sizes are now computed based on the probability to obtain a specific phase-known genotype, instead of the probability of observing the corresponding genotype scores (arbitrary phase), resulting in an increased population size for genotypes with linkage phase ambiguity. This ensures that the precise phase-known genotype is expected among the offspring, even if its linkage phase is ambiguous, in which case standard genotyping techniques can not easily identify it. An appropriate method will then have to be applied to identify the genotype with the desired phase among all candidates with the corresponding genotype scores.
• Added new heuristic (H6) which computes a heuristic lower bound on the population size of any extension of a given partial schedule, based on the probabilities of crossovers that are necessarily still required to obtain the ideotyope. This new heuristic is activated in presets default, faster and fastest.
• Optimized some code to keep you happy.

Version 1.3 (20 November 2013)

• Improved pruning criteria. May result in lower runtimes.
• Cleaned up command line messages (including warnings and errors).

Version 1.2 (23 September 2013)

• Improved distribution of work among independent threads. May result in lower runtimes on multicore machines.

Version 1.1 (20 August 2013)

• Renamed option -r, --max-risk <r> to -lpa, --max-linkage-phase-ambiguity <a>, used to limit the maximum 'linkage phase ambiguity', which was formerly referred to as 'risk'.

Version 1.0 (13 August 2013)

• Initial release of the Gene Stacker software.