NEST is designed to infer rates of nest participation and the average proportion of offspring produced for parent individuals in two different categories (for instance different age groups) from genetic data on offspring and potential parents. Offspring data are assumed to be collected in nests; multiple males and females may have contributed to the nest, so that offspring individuals are likely to be full sibs or half sibs, but may be unrelated. The software is currently set up to reflect the Mottled Sculpin mating system, so multiple females contribute to a nest that usually has only one male contributor, but may have cuckolding by one or more males. The program can be easily adapted to the case where one or both sexes are monogamous; contact the author for details.

Planned improvements for the program include: ability to cope with a known genotype for one parent, ability to cope with more than 2 groups, ability to cope with larger pools of potential parents (currently memory used is of the order #potential mothers x #potential fathers x #offspring... most examples have had this ~300,000), and an improved user interface (including reading in allele names rather than index numbers).

Problems using NEST? Contact m.b.jones *at* massey *dot* ac *dot* nz

Download a tarfile containing the NEST source, and a README file: NEST

This software is provided as-is, without any waranty whatsoever.

The development of NEST was supported in part by the Marsden fund of New Zealand via a Fast Start grant to Beatrix Jones.