Hi,
I am using PLINK 1.9 and am trying to convert a bim, bed, and fam file into VCF format. I use the command
plink --bfile filename --keep-allele-order --recode vcf -- out filename
I then receive the message: 1512 people (184 males, 1319 females, 9 ambiguous) loaded from .fam
I also receive the message: 1503 phenotype values loaded from .fam (this suggests to me that it is successfully reading in my sex and phenotype information into the vcf file)
However, the issue I run into is that when I try to convert the vcf file back into a bim, bed, and fam file using the code below, the fam file ends up having all 0's in the sex column and all -9's in the phenotype column
--vcf filename.vcf --out output_files
Does anyone know why I am losing all my sex and phenotype information when converting my fam file from vcf and back to fam
1 answer
Because there isn't a natural way for a vcf to store phenotype or sex information - they aren't really designed for that kind of data. It's not present in the vcf, so it can't be present in the resulting fam file.
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