AncestryPainter: A Graphic Program for Displaying Ancestry Composition of Populations and Individuals

Ancestry composition of populations and individuals has been extensively investigated in recent years due to advances in the genotyping and sequencing technologies. As the number of populations and individuals used for ancestry inference increases remarkably, say more than 100 populations or 1000 individuals, it is usually challenging to present the ancestry composition in a traditional way using a rectangular graph. To address this issue, we developed a program, AncestryPainter, which can illustrate the ancestry composition of populations and individuals with a rounded and nice-looking graph to save space. Individuals are depicted as length-fixed bars partitioned into colored segments representing different ancestries, and the population of interest can be highlighted as a pie chart in the center of the circle plot. In addition, AncestryPainter can also be applied to display personal ancestry in a way similar to that for displaying population ancestry. AncestryPainter is publicly available at http://www.picb.ac.cn/PGG/resource.php.