GenABEL is an R package for performing genome-wide association with linear mixed models and a genomic relationship matrix. RepeatABEL is a package for such genome-wide association studies that also need repeated measures.

Unfortunately, since 2018, GenABEL is not available on CRAN anymore, because of failed checks that were not fixed. (Checks are archived on CRAN, but this means very little to me.) As a consequence, RepeatABEL is also missing.

Fair enough, the GenABEL creators probably aren’t paid to maintain old software. It is a bit tragic, however, to think that in 2016, GenABEL was supposed to be the core of a community project to develop a suite of genomic analysis packages, two years before it was taken of CRAN:

The original publication of the GenABEL package for statistical analysis of genotype data has led to the evolution of a community which we now call the GenABEL project, which brings together scientists, software developers and end users with the central goal of making statistical genomics work by openly developing and subsequently implementing statistical models into user-friendly software.

The project has benefited from an open development model, facilitating communication and code sharing between the parties involved. The use of a free software licence for the tools in the GenABEL suite promotes quick uptake and widespread dissemination of new methodologies and tools. Moreover, public access to the source code is an important ingredient for active participation by people from outside the core development team and is paramount for reproducible research. Feedback from end users is actively encouraged through a web forum, which steadily grows into a knowledge base with a multitude of answered questions. Furthermore, our open development process has resulted in transparent development of methods and software, including public code review, a large fraction of bugs being submitted by members of the community, and quick incorporation of bug fixes.

I have no special insight about the circumstances here, but obviously the situation is far from ideal. You can still use the packages, though, with a little more effort to install. Who knows how long that will be the case, though. In a complex web of dependencies like the R package ecosystem, an unmaintained package probably won’t last.

GenABEL can probably be replaced by something like GEMMA. It does mixed models for GWAS, and while it isn’t an R package, it’s probably about as convenient. However, I don’t know of a good alternative to RepeatABEL.

These are the steps to install GenABEL and RepeatABEL from archives:

1. We go to the CRAN archive and get the tarballs for GenABEL, GenABEL.data which it needs, and RepeatABEL.

   curl -O https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/GenABEL/GenABEL_1.8-0.tar.gz
   curl -O https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/GenABEL.data/GenABEL.data_1.0.0.tar.gz
   curl -O https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/RepeatABEL/RepeatABEL_1.1.tar.gz
   

   We don’t need to unpack them.

2. Install GenABEL.data and GenABEL from a local source. Inside R, we can use install.packages, using the files we’ve just downloaded instead of the online repository.

   install.packages(c("GenABEL.data_1.0.0.tar.gz", "GenABEL_1.8-0.tar.gz"), repos = NULL)
   

3. To install RepeatABEL, we first need hglm, which we can get from CRAN. After that has finished, we install RepeatABEL, again from local source:

   install.packages("hglm")
   install.packages("RepeatABEL_1.1.tar.gz", repos = NULL)
   

This worked on R version 3.6.1 running on Ubuntu 16.04, and also on Mac OS X.

Literature

Karssen, Lennart C., Cornelia M. van Duijn, and Yurii S. Aulchenko. ”The GenABEL Project for statistical genomics.” F1000Research 5 (2016).