Quercus is a program for the maximum likelihood analysis of variance of quantitative genetic data. The programs perform ML or REML on a two generation pedigree with multivariate phenotypic observations and fixed effects. Up to six variance components including additive genetic, dominance, maternal, paternal, and residual (and their covariances in the multivariate case) can be calculated.
The MLE can be constrained to satisfy feasibility requirements or for hypothesis testing. A program is also included which will maximize the likelihood while constraining the additive covariance component matrices of two unrelated populations to be the same. The source code, in standard Pascal, is available via anonymous ftp at ecology.umn.edu in the directory pub/quercus (or use the link on this page). The code can be translated into C using available software. This code is suitable for most workstations and mainframes.
Download: Quercus
Download: Quercus Readme File
For more information on Quercus, please contact Dr. Ruth Shaw.