CircuSoft OPediT pedigree drawing software is a simple but elegant tool for generating graphical representations of complex breeding pedigrees. OPediT is an ideal companion to CircuSoft gMouse, allowing you to generate graphical pedigrees of almost any size from your transgenic mouse colony data.
This basic tutorial will take you through the steps required to install OPediT and generate some pedigrees. To get up and running should take about 10-15 minutes. The later part of the tutorial covers more advanced features like exporting data from gMouse and editing pedigrees.
To get started, you need to complete three simple steps:
When OPediT installs, it should create a program icon on your desktop. The easiest way to launch the application is to double-click this icon. If you are away from your computer, you can also launch OPediT directly from our site. Use the OPediT beta account you created above to log in.
Once OPediT has started, click File | Open... and select the "10081.pre" file you downloaded as part of the sample data. This file contains a simple pedigree with 16 entries. Each entry has a unique identifying number (Animal ID). The Father ID number, Mother ID number, Sex, and Affected status are also specified for each row. Rows with Father and Mother ID entries of zero (0) are founder animals. The Affected status indicates whether the entry will be colored in the pedigree chart. You can sort each column by clicking the column header.
To see the graphical depiction of the pedigree, click Tools | Draw Pedigree from the main menu. This will upload the data to our server, draw the pedigree, and send back the graphics. The completed pedigree is then displayed in the Graph tab. If the image is zoomed too far in or out, click the "Zoom Extents" button in the Graph tab menu. Dragging your mouse on the pedigree graph moves the image. Holding down shift while dragging zooms in and out. Moving your mouse cursor over an element displays information about the animal in the table to the left.
To add a new offspring, click on the Data tab to see the raw data. Click the Insert Row button from the toolbar to make a new row. The new row will automatically be numbered 17. Set the Father ID to 15 and the Mother ID to 12. Click on the Graph tab. Since you have edited the data, you must now click the "Refresh Graph" button in the Graph tab toolbar to update the image.
To load a more sophisticated pedigree, click File | Open... and select the "example2.csv" file from the sample data. This data has been exported from a gMouse database and contains more information about each mouse. Click the Tools | Draw Pedigree button to view the graphical layout.
If you are a current gMouse user, you can easily export your existing mouse data so that you can use OPediT to create graphical pedigrees. Download the OPediT / gMouse export tool and place it in the same directory as your gMouseData file. Open the opedit.fp7 file and follow the instructions for exporting. Make sure you export to a CSV file, not the default tab-delimited file! Use OPediT to load the exported data.
OPediT can currently do some simple error checking on your data. The Tools | Error Check... function will make sure that all animals are of the expected gender. In other words, mothers should be female, fathers male. If an animal is listed as both a mother and father, a "recursive error" will be generated in the status bar. The Tools | Remove Orphans function will remove animals that are not linked to any other animals in the data to reduce clutter.
OPediT can handle pedigrees consisting of thousands of entries. However, the more animals in the data set, the longer it takes to generate the pedigree and the harder it is to make sense of the output. A complicated layout of several thousand inter-related animals can take our server several minutes to compute.
OPediT provides tools to intelligently view subsets of your colony. Three such tools are available by right-clicking on any row in the data table:
OPediT supports different layout methods for pedigree graphs. The default is the heirarchical layout with each generation on a row. Other methods such as Cluster (spring) may be useful for viewing large data sets and are available under the Graphs tab.
| 09/15/05 | New version of OPediT available | OPediT |
| 05/19/05 | OPediT public beta release available | OPediT |
| OPediT Sample Pedigree Data Files | OPediT |
| OPediT gMouse Export Tool | OPediT |