We have extended the variance components approach to model repeated measures in a quantitative trait linkage study. This website includes instructions on how
to use our approach (implemented in Merlin) and also R tools which facilitate the evaluation of power and cost for different designs. Repeated measures
substantially improve power and the proportional increase in LOD score depends mostly on measurement error and total heritability but not much on marker map
or number of alleles per marker (i.e. relative insensitive to genotyping platforms). The R implementation includes two functions, BestRepeat(Vm,
cost.pheno, Va, Vg, Ve, s), to be used when parental phenotypes are available. (instructions) and
woparent.BestRepeat(Vm, cost.pheno, Va, Vg, Ve, s) to be used when parental phenotypes are not available. (instructions).
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