About Cicada

1.0. Introduction

Cicada is a web-based system written by Edward H. Trager for managing marker data used in genetic linkage analyses.

After gels are run on an ABI machine and initial peak calls have been obtained using ABI's Genotyper software, data are imported into an editing module in Cicada where peak calls can be normalized to known CEPH standards.

A unique feature of Cicada is the new histogram-based editor. This editor allows the user to visually verify binning accuracy. Binning errors are visually discernible as colored histogram bars that are clearly "out of place" (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Histogram-based Editor. A new and unique feature of Cicada is the histogram-based editor which quickly reveals erroneous allele calls which appear as colored bars that are "out of place".

Clicking on the out-of-place bars with the mouse brings up the relevant subset of data in an editor in the lower-half of the screen. The user can then save manually-corrected allele call edits to the database. Without the histogram-based editor, many of these kinds of errors would go unnoticed.

Data retrieved from Cicada are in a human-readable flat-file format ready for immediate manipulation by the program Madeline.