PING is free software used for genotyping the highly polymorphic killer immunoglobulin-like recptor (KIR) loci. The PING pipeline, developed in collaboration with Dr. Paul Norman (CU Anschutz), was created to automatically extract KIR reads from whole genome or exome data sets, attribute them to specific loci and generate a consensus sequence that can be interpreted as a KIR genotype. The PING analysis pipeline is designed to detect all known and any novel KIR SNP variants, a crucial limitation of all other methods. Using filters that consider all variants of each homologous gene, including pseudogenes, the method ensures selection of only those read-pairs mapping exclusively to a locus. All procedures are performed using free software and R language programming.

A full description of the pipeline can be found in Marin et al. 2021, PLOS CompBio.

PING was developed with the support of NIH grant R01AI128775.