format
one of the two possible values allowed by the program "ATCG", which means your calls are in base-pair-letter code, i.e. "AT" in a diploid call, "AATT" tetraploid etc (just example). Therefore possible codes can be "A", "T", "C", "G", "-" (deletion), "+" (insertion). Alternatively "AB" format can be used as well. Commonly this depends from the genotyping technologies used, such as GBS or microarrays. In addition, we have enabled also the use of single-letter code used by Cornell, i.e. A=AA, C=CC, T=TT, G=GG, R=AG, Y=CT, S=CG, W=AT, K=GT, M=AC. The "ATCG" format also works for the bi-allelic marker codes from join map such as "lm", "ll","nn", "np","hh","hk","kk"
multi
a TRUE/FALSE statement indicating if the function should get rid of the markers with more than 2 alleles. If FALSE, which indicates that if markers with multiple alleles are found, the alternate and reference alleles will be the first 2 alleles found. This could be risky since some alleles will be masked, i.e. AA AG AT would take only A and G as reference and alternate alleles, converting to numeric format 2 1 1, giving the same effect to AG and AT which could be a wrong assumption. The default is TRUE, removes markers with more than two alleles.
by.allele
a TRUE/FALSE value indicating if the program should transform the data in a zero/one matrix of presence/absense per allele. For example, a marker with 3 alleles A,T,C in a diploid organism will yield 6 possible configurations; AA, AT, AC, TT, TC, CC. Therefore, the program would create 3 columns for this marker indicating the presence/absence of each allele for each genotype.