YAGS (Yet Another Genetics Simulator) is a Ruby on Rails application for simulating Mendelian genetics. Students can use YAGS to experiment with genetics and inheritance without the messiness of real fruit flies.

Motivation

The Biology Department had been using the same software to simulate Mendelian genetics in Biology 141 and other courses. This software only runs on the OS 9 version of the Macintosh, and it hadn’t been updated since 1993. Since there were serious problems supporting this software on the new Intel Macs of 2007, Steve Matheson of the Biology Department looked for another solution.

Ultimately, he ended up talking to our own Jeremy Frens and Randy Pruim to see how difficult it would be to create a new, better version of the software. After some discussion, they decided to implement a web application using Ruby on Rails. The Ruby on Rails framework was certainly rich enough to provide the simulation support, and as a web application, it would make instructor monitoring much easier.

Work

Summer 2007

During the Summer of 2007, two students, Brian Ryckbost and Greg Clark, built the first version of the software. They were able to create enough features—including simple recessive-dominant traits, codominance, linked traits, and sex-linked traits—that the software will be used in Biology 141 (Cell Biology) this coming year.

Future

Plans for the future include:

• Modeling other types of animals (like rats) and plants (like peas).
• Modeling other types of genetics (like traits dependent on more than one gene).
• Finding a place to host a public server for anyone to use.