Dear all, First of all thanks a lot for the responses I had to my question about user-friendly population genetics programs that run in Mac OSX. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to exist such a programme with a graphical interface, which I find curious given that Macs used to be more user-friendly than Windows. Here I post the answsers I have had. Cheers, Ramiro 1) What about running DnaSP/DAMBE/etc. on Windows (with bootcamp or Parallels) on the Mac instead? 2) Given your post on the Evoldir, I cannot help but plug my own software, GenoDive. However, it does not handle sequences, but it does handle most other types of genetic markers and can perform several different analyses with them, among which AMOVA's. Anyway, as far as I can tell myself it is very user friendly, and may be useful to you for some other purposes. The current version can be downloaded from my website: http://www.bentleydrummer.nl/software. Please keep in mind that it is a beta version, so there may still be some bugs. 3) The package of software written by Kevin Thornton and Eli Stahl (molpopgen) is excellent and very flexible. This package is written in C++, and it was relatively painless to compile on my Mac (which runs OSX Tiger). In particular, the 'analysis' package can do most of the analyses that DnaSP can do. 4) I saw your post of Evoldir. There is nothing that I am aware of in terms of software with a graphical interface. On Intel-based macs, you can run DNAsp through one of the many windows emulators available (Parallels, VMware, etc.). Alternatively, I have written several software packages of command-line applications which are portable across many Unix systems, and work fine on OS X. http://www.molpopgen.org 5) Kevin Thornton has a set of applications (MKtest, compute, polydNdS) for this sort of thing that work well on Mac OSX; they are available at molpopgen.org. They are not as user-friendly as DnaSP - you have to run them from the terminal, and you will need to compile them from C++ source code (after downloading and installing libraries - instructions are on the website too). 6) You could try GenAlEx6 or Genepop 4.0. 7) You can use Jeffrey Townsend's SeqPop that runs command-line on the terminal: http://www.yale.edu/townsend/software.html A similar option is Kevin Thornton's collection of command-line programs that use his libsequence library: http://molpopgen.org/software/lseqsoftware.html A nice Java program is Fu & Li's NeutralityTest: http://www.hgc.sph.uth.tmc.edu/neutrality_test It implements a variety of tests, like Fu's, Fu & Li's, Tajima's, Fay & Wu's, MK, HKA, LWL, Suzuki-Gojobori. There a way to run Windows programs without installing Windows per se. The application is called WINE and exists for Linux. It was recently ported to OSX. There is the DarWINE project, but the current version is for PowerPC (PPC) architecture, not Intel-based Macs. This requires getting your hands dirty and installing libraries, compiling, etc. A company called CodeWeavers (http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac) are selling CrossOver for the Mac and Linux, so as to run Windows applications seemlessly. The academic price is $42 and DnaSP runs just fine. If you have long sequences, like genomic data, the DnaSP crew has written VariScan: http://www.ub.es/softevol/variscan If you're interested in simulations and test statistics, Sebas Ramos-Onsins from the Univ. of Barcelona has written mlSimCoal (based on Hudson's famous ms program): http://www.ub.es/softevol/mlcoalsim Peter Andolfatto from UCSD has a few programs like that at http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/labs/andolfatto/Programs.html 8) Have you tried Arlequin ( lgb.unige.ch/arlequin/ )? Although I haven't used the Mac version, they do have one and it does alot of tests, including neutrality. Once you get your dataset into the proper format (GenePop on the web can do this for you), which is a pain, it's fairly user friendly. Dr. Ramiro Morales-Hojas Molecular Evolution Lab IBMC Rua do Campo Alegre 823 Porto 4150-180 Portugal e-mail: rmhojas@ibmc.up.pt rmhojas@ibmc.up.pt