title: Browsing isolated population data.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  In our studies of genetically isolated populations in a remote mountain area in the center of Sardinia (Italy), we found that 80-85% of the inhabitants of each village belong to a single huge pedigree with families strictly connected to each other through hundreds of loops. Moreover, intermarriages between villages join pedigrees of different villages through links that make family trees even more complicated. Unfortunately, none of the commonly used pedigree drawing tools are able to draw the complete pedigree, whereas it is commonly accepted that the visual representation of families is very important as it helps researchers in identifying clusters of inherited traits and genotypes. We had a representation issue that compels researchers to work with subsets extracted from the overall genealogy, causing a serious loss of information on familiar relationships. To visually explore such complex pedigrees, we developed PedNavigator, a browser for genealogical databases properly suited for genetic studies.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The PedNavigator is useful for genealogical research due to its capacity to represent family relations between persons and to make a visual verification of the links during family history reconstruction. As for genetic studies, it is helpful to follow propagation of a specific set of genetic markers (haplotype), or to select people for linkage analysis, showing relations between various branch of a family tree of affected subjects.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  PedNavigator is an application integrated into a Framework designed to handle data for human genetic studies based on the Oracle platform. To allow the use of PedNavigator also to people not owning the same required informatics infrastructure or systems, we developed PedNavigator Lite with mainly the same features of the integrated one, based on MySQL database server. This version is free for academic users, and it is available for download from our site http://www.shardna.com.
authors.affiliation: SharDNA Life Sciences, Cagliari, Italy. mancosu@shardna.it
authors.forename: Gianmaria
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Mancosu
authors.forename: Massimiliano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cosso
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Marras
authors.forename: Cesare Cappio
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Borlino
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ledda
authors.forename: Teresa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Manias
authors.forename: Mauro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Adamo
authors.forename: Donatella
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Serra
authors.forename: Paola
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Melis
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pirastu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003628:Database Management Systems; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D005260:Female; D008040:Genetic Linkage; D005819:Genetic Markers; D005828:Genetics, Population / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D007558:Italy; D015810:Linkage Disequilibrium; D008297:Male; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010375:Pedigree; D011153:Population; D044382:Population Groups; D011381:Programming Languages; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface
chemical_list: D005819:Genetic Markers