# Drawing human pedigree charts with DrawPed

## TL;DR

DrawPed is a free online tool for creating and editing detailed human pedigree charts, which are useful in biomedical research.

## Contribution

DrawPed introduces an open-source, interactive tool for drawing and editing human pedigrees from standard PED files.

## Key findings

- DrawPed automatically generates pedigree charts from PED files and allows interactive editing.
- Pedigree charts created with DrawPed are scalable and suitable for publication.
- DrawPed supports displaying additional information like deceased persons and consanguinity.

## Abstract

Creating pedigree charts is a recurring task in biomedical research, but there are few online tools for drawing complex human pedigrees available and even fewer are free. With DrawPed we aim to close this gap. DrawPed automatically draws pedigree charts from standard PED format pedigree files. Users can also create pedigrees from scratch and interactively edit existing pedigrees. The application can display conditions not captured in a PED file such as deceased persons or suspected consanguinity of parents. Pedigree charts are displayed as SVGs, which are scalable and hence publication-ready. Pedigrees can be exported as PED files for storage, exchange, or use in other applications. DrawPed is open source and freely available at https://www.genecascade.org/DrawPed/.

Graphical Abstract