ISFG Summer School 2025

Dates: September 4 & 5, 2025
Where: Online, as part of ISFG Summer School 2025
Teachers: Magnus Dehli Vigeland and Thore Egeland

Description

The study of pedigrees and genetic relatedness is central in forensic genetics. The aim of this course is to introduce the elegant statistical foundations of relatedness, as well as several forensic applications. In the basic course we focus on pedigree coefficients and likelihood ratios for kinship analysis. We introduce the QuickPed app for drawing and analysing pedigrees, and will also be using R for calculations and visualisations. Lectures and exercises are based on the book Pedigree Analysis in R.

The advanced session builds on the basic part, delving deeper into applications and implementations of pedigree analysis in forensic genetics. Main topics for this workshop include pedigree reconstruction and disaster victim identification.

Learning outcome

After completing the course the participants will have knowledge about:

Classical concepts of statistical genetics and relatedness analysis
How to produce informative and beautiful pedigree plots
How to compute coefficients of relatedness
How to perform kinship testing and pedigree reconstruction in R
How to perform disaster victim identification with R and Diviana.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of genetics and probability
Some previous experience with R is recommended, but not strictly required
A recent version of R (at least 4.2) must be installed on your computer
We recommend running R from RStudio

The following R command installs the pedsuite packages, which will be used throughout the course:

install.packages("pedsuite")

Schedule

The course runs from 08 to 12 (CEST) each day, with a 15 minute break in the middle. The following schedule is tentative:

Aug 30 (Wed). WS 10.1 – Pedigree analysis: Basic

08:00–09:00 Pedigrees and measures of relatedness (MDV)
09:00–10:00 Exercises I
10:00–10:15 Break
10:15–11:00 Kinship testing (TE)
11:00–11:45 Exercises II
11:45–12:00 Summary and discussion

Aug 31 (Thu). WS 10.2 – Pedigree analysis: Advanced

08:00–09:00 Relatedness inference and pedigree reconstruction (MDV)
09:00–10:00 Exercises III
10:00–10:15 Break
10:00–11:00 Disaster victim identification (TE)
11:00–11:45 Exercises IV
11:45–12:00 Summary and discussion