Technical Abstract: We have developed Perl Scripts for the cost-effective planning of fingerprinting and genotyping experiments. The UPIC scripts detect the best combination of polymorphic simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers and provide coefficients of the amount of information obtainable (number of alleles of patterns) for each combination of markers. In addition, the Perl Script package calculates polymorphic information content (PIC) values for various types of fertilization in organisms, and the percentage of heterozygous loci for each DNA sample. UPIC group of scripts is a very useful tool to plan experiments maximizing the information obtainable at the lowest cost.