History of the Genepop Web Project

The primary purpose of the original DOS based software is to compute exact tests for the following :

• Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium
• Population differentiation, and
• Genotypic disequilibrium among pairs of loci

• Allele Frequencies and other basic information,
• Fst and other correlations,
• Maximum likelihood estimates in the presence of a NULL allele,
• Nm estimates by the private allele method.

This Internet version was originally developed in late 1996 as a joint project between the School of Biomedical Sciences and the School of Computing at Curtin University of Technology. The primary development team consisted of four 3rd year computer science students under the guidance of Andrew Marriot (Dept of Computer Science) as a Computer Graphics Imagery 352 project. Co-supervisor for the project was Associate Professor John Wetherall (School of Biomedical Sciences).
The original development team consisted of :

• Terence Chang
• Robert Hendrie
• Jeremy Abercrombie-Higgins
• Rod Maddocks
• Eleanor Morgan (Project Coordinator)

• Eleanor Morgan
• Ba Tu Truong

• Expected and Observed No of Homozygotes
• Expected and Observed No of Heterozygotes
• Global estimates of Fis according to Weir and Cockerham (W&C) and Robertson and Hill (R&H).

Although numerous sample files have been tested with the current web version and compared with the current Dos Genepop version (3.1c), undetected problems (bugs) could still remain with these modules.

Recent Bug fixes :

• mid-November, 1999 - fixed bug in Option 6 - suboptions 1-4. Files with more than 10 unique alleles at a given locus were returning incorrect results.
• mid-December, 1999 - completely rewrote modules for Option 4 - Nm estimates in Perl (previously converted to C from Dos version in QuickBasic). Inaccurate results were reported for this option. It is now working correctly for all data files tested.
• mid-January, 2000 - Discovered that Genepop web modules were not handling spaces in names properly (don't know how I missed this one previously!).
  This is now fixed up.
• mid-January, 2000 - rewrote Option 2 - sub-option 3 (Create a dummy allele) in Perl. C version was sometimes crashing for no apparent reason. Seems to be working correctly now.
• mid-January, 2000. - Discovered that LinkDos was not processing files for email only (this was my fault as the primary script was deleting the temporary files before the email daemon had a chance to process them!). This is now fixed.
• early February, 2000 - The C version of one of the modules used in Option 6 and Option 3 (genotip2) was occasionally crashing. I converted this module from the original QuickBasic to Perl.
  Also converted associated QuickBasic modules to Perl (modules originally written in Pascal will remain in C for the web version). Perl version appears to be a bit slower but more stable.