SoMarker: a genetic marker searching tool for Caenorhabditis elegans

Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the most popular model organisms used to genetically dissect complex biological phenomena. One common technique used routinely in the C. elegans laboratory is the generation of strains carrying combinations of genetic mutations via classical genetic crosses. Here, we have developed a simple and convenient application to quickly identify useful genetic markers (phenotypical and fluorescent) and their chromosomal positions to aid in the development of genetic cross strategies. The user-friendly software identifies and prioritizes markers with the least genetic distance to a gene of interest, as well as displays the strain name, ease of scoring, nature of the marker (fluorescent transgene or phenotypic information), mating efficiency, and number of available alleles. In addition, recombination frequencies between the gene of interest and each genetic marker are calculated automatically. The application, called "SoMarker," is designed for both MacOS and Windows environments and is available to freely download and modify through open-source software.