Kinship Analysis with Linked Markers

A 'shiny' application for forensic kinship testing, based on the 'pedsuite' R packages. 'KLINK' is closely aligned with the (non-R) software 'Familias' and 'FamLink', but offers several unique features, including visualisations and automated report generation. The calculation of likelihood ratios supports pairs of linked markers, and all common mutation models. The program is described in Vigeland and Gilfillan (2026) .

KLINK: Kinship analysis with linked markers

KLINK is an R package and Shiny app for LR calculations in forensic kinship testing, with support for pairwise linked STR markers. It is built on pedsuite, with a dedicated KLINK homepage.

For details, see the paper KLINK: A program for kinship testing with pairwise linked STR markers (Vigeland and Gilfillan, 2026, Forensic Science International: Genetics).

Try the online app: https://magnusdv.shinyapps.io/klink/

Running KLINK locally

If you are working with sensitive data, you might want to run KLINK locally/offline. To set this up, first install the KLINK package in R:

install.packages("KLINK")

Then you may start KLINK as follows:

KLINK::launchApp()