Blossoc

Blossoc is a software tool that aids in linkage disequilibrium association mapping. The tool works by building genealogies for each site in the input and scoring them using non-random clustering of affected individuals, thus identifying high-scoring areas as potential candidates. Utilizing heuristics which may not guarantee true trees but offer speed advantages over more sophisticated methods, Blossoc can handle larger data sets, albeit with some accuracy trade-offs.

For installation, Blossoc is written in C++ and is available as source code (under the GNU General Public License, GPL) and binary versions as Linux RPM files. While source code can be compiled on various Linux and UNIX systems, binary distributions for other platforms are not available unless manually built by a user.

To use Blossoc, input files containing marker positions and haplotype data are required. The haplotype file should have one line per haplotype, with each allele represented as either a '0' or '1', and the first column indicating a pseudo-allele for the case/control dichotomy. Blossoc is started from the command-line, and users can view the complete list of command-line options by running blossoc --help.

Finally, the latest version of Blossoc includes new features, such as a port to the new SNPFile format version 2.0. These enhancements add to the already strong capabilities of Blossoc as a linkage disequilibrium association mapping tool.