Farrel, Thanks for sharing the problem you have encountered. One challenge with the .ped format "standard" is there are so many variations to choose from. Unfortunately, the "Gold" format you are trying to load lacks the required header row with all the marker names as documented in http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.1/bioc/vignettes/fbat/inst/doc/fbat.pdf , so cannot be parsed. The error message should be more helpful but if you add a row with space delimited marker names (eg m1 m2) corresponding to each marker in the data, I think you should find it will load fine. "Farrel Buchinsky" wrote: Message: 10 Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:59:22 -0500 From: "Farrel Buchinsky" Subject: [BioC] GeneticsBase readGenes not reading To: bioconductor@stat.math.ethz.ch Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain Any idea why I get this message b <-readGenes("pedformat.txt",gformat="ped") Error in FUN(X[[2L]], ...) : cannot coerce to vector Where pedformat.txt was diretly copied from http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/abecasis/GOLD/docs/pedigree.html 100 1 0 0 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 100 2 0 0 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 100 3 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 -- python -c "foo = map(None,'moc.liamg@surazal.ssor'); foo.reverse(); print ''.join(foo)" [[alternative HTML version deleted]]