GPFrontend and GPGraphics: graphical analysis tools for genetic association studies

BACKGROUND: Most software packages for whole genome association studies are non-graphical, purely text based programs originally designed to run with UNIX-like operating systems. Graphical output is often not intended or supposed to be performed with other command line tools, e.g. gnuplot. RESULTS: Using the Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform and Visual Studio 2005, we have created a graphical software package to analyze data from microarray whole genome association studies, both for a DNA-pooling based approach as well as regular single sample data. Part of this package was made to integrate with GenePool 0.8.2, a previously existing software suite for GNU/Linux systems, which we have modified to run in a Microsoft Windows environment. Further modifications cause it to generate some additional data. This enables GenePool to interact with the .NET parts created by us. The programs we developed are GPFrontend, a graphical user interface and frontend to use GenePool and create metadata files for it, and GPGraphics, a program to further analyze and graphically evaluate output of different WGA analysis programs, among them also GenePool. CONCLUSIONS: Our programs enable regular MS Windows users without much experience in bioinformatics to easily visualize whole genome data from a variety of sources.