MateSoft is a software for the analysis of mating systems in male-haplodiploid organisms based on co-dominant genetic marker data. It is intended to be used in studies of hymenopteran social insects, where queens may have mated with one or several males and males may sire a variable proportion of the queen’s offspring. The genetic data can be queen genotypes, genotypes of single-queen female offspring, and genotypes of sperm stored in the queen’s spermatheca.

The current version of MateSoft has the following main features:

• Deduction of possible queen genotypes from offspring data when the mother could not be analysed.


• Deduction of genotypes of putative males mated with the queen from offspring and queen data.


• Assigning offspring to patrilines corresponding to the queen’s putative mates.


• Estimation of mating frequency statistics from data where the queen can be either single or double mated. The statistics calculated are paternity skew, proportion of multiple mated queens, and average effective mate number using the algorithms in Pedersen and Boomsma (1999; Molecular Ecology, 8: 577–587). The input is either genotypes of queens, their putative mates and offspring assigned to patrilines, or genotypes of queens and sperm from their spermathecae.


• Estimation of summary mating frequency statistics from data where the queen can have any number of matings. These include the sum of squared paternity contributions, frequency distribution of observed mate number, and average observed mate number.


• Deduction of parental genotypes and patriline assignment can be done for any number of queen matings. This deduction is considerably less trivial than previously assumed in studies of parentage in social Hymenoptera and new algorithms are developed for this purpose.

For more details please browse the documentation here or go directly to download.

System requirements
MateSoft runs on any PC under a 32 bit version of Microsoft Windows and will also work under PC-Windows emulation on a Macintosh.

Current version
Version 1.0, released 28 April 2004. This is a minor upgrade with mainly cosmetic changes of the beta version released 27 March 2003. Thanks to the beta users for their feedback on software performance.

Download
MateSoft can be downloaded here. The distribution file is a zip archive including the executable, full documentation and Mol. Ecol. Notes paper in pdf format, and a set of example files.

Registration
To register please click here.

Citation as publication (preferred)
Moilanen A, Sundström L & Pedersen JS (2004) MateSoft: a program for deducing parental genotypes and estimating mating system statistics in haplodiploid species. Molecular Ecology Notes, 4, 795-797. (pdf).

Citation as software (alternative)
Moilanen A, Sundström L & Pedersen JS (2004) MateSoft: a program for genetic analysis of mating systems 1.0. Institute of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen. Available at http://www2.bio.ku.dk/JSPedersen/MateSoft/

Atte Moilanen
Implementation and algorithms
e-mail: ajmoilan@mappi.helsinki.fi
Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
University of Helsinki

Liselotte Sundström
Concept and testing
e-mail: liselotte.sundstrom@helsinki.fi
Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
University of Helsinki

Jes Søe Pedersen
Algorithms, documentation and testing
E-mail: JSPedersen@bio.ku.dk
Department of Population Biology
Institute of Biology
University of Copenhagen