Welcome to Ancestry Painter Web Toolkit

Introduction

Estimation of ancestry for individuals is a key question in population genetics, which was tried to be solved by model-based approaches like structure1, ADMIXTURE2. These clustering software concerned with estimating the proportion of K ancestries (K clusters) for each individual, where K is a parameter given in advance, but can be varied in independent runs. Individuals are given proportion for each ancestry, such that the estimated proportions of an individual sum to one across the K ancestries. The matrix of ancestry proportion is referred to here as the individual Q-matrix (the Q out file of ADMIXTURE software).

A convenient way to display the ancestry of individuals is to show each individual as a line segment, which is partitioned into K colored components, with the length of each colored component represents the proportion of its corresponding ancestry. Such graphic display can be achieved by existing programs like Distruct3. However, all existing programs as far as we know display populations in a horizontal direction. If there were too many individuals or populations, the graphic would be extremely long and difficult to display in a single line. Besides, display all individuals in a single line is not convenient for comparison if they are relatively distant in display.

To solve these drawbacks, our program uses a circular way to display the ancestry of individuals, with advances in that:

  1. The circular display avoid the awkward situation of too many populations in order, thus takes a better advantage of space
  2. For a better comparison, the width of each population was set to be equal regardless of its sample size
  3. A pie chart could be optionally added in the center of the circular graph to highlight the ancestry proportion of the target population/individual the user particularly concerned
  4. For a better view purpose, the order of population as well as individuals within populations in display could be automatically sorted according to their ancestry proportion.

This web toolkit is a user-friendly interface based on the command-line version of Ancestry Painter. You may click here to download the original user manual.

How to use

You may download sample inputs here or click to check out sample outputs.

  1. Go to the input page.
  2. Select Q-matrix file and information file.
  3. Set desired parameters (optional). Detailed explanations and examples are listed in the user manual.
  4. Click the "analyze" button to run. Please be patient as uploading files may take some time.

You will receive a link to the page that will later display the resulting figure and allow you to download all the output data as a zip file.

Note: Due to the uncertainty of computation workload, the waiting time is not garuanteed.