readTargets              package:limma              R Documentation

_R_e_a_d _R_N_A _T_a_r_g_e_t_s _F_i_l_e

_D_e_s_c_r_i_p_t_i_o_n:

     Read targets file for a two-color microarray experiment into a
     dataframe.

_U_s_a_g_e:

     readTargets(file="Targets.txt", path=NULL, sep="\t", row.names="FileName",quote="\"",...)

_A_r_g_u_m_e_n_t_s:

    file: character string giving the name of the targets file.

    path: character string giving the directory containing the file.
          Can be omitted if the file is in the current working
          irectory.

     sep: field separator character

row.names: character string giving name of column from which to obtain
          row names

   quote: the set of quoting characters

     ...: other arguments are passed to 'read.table'

_D_e_t_a_i_l_s:

     The targets file is a text file containing information about the
     RNA samples used as targets in the microarray experiment. The
     files should have a row of column headers and shoule have one row
     for each array in the experiment. Normally there are columns
     labelled 'Cy3' and 'Cy5' or similar specifying which RNA samples
     are hybridized to each channel of each array. Other columns may
     contain any other information associated with the arrays or
     targets used in the experiment. If there is a column named
     'FileName' then that will be used to construct row names for the
     dataframe.

     See the Limma User's Guide for examples of this function.

_V_a_l_u_e:

     Data frame usually including columns 

     Cy3: character vector giving names of RNA samples

     Cy5: character vector giving names of RNA samples

     Character columns are not converted into factors.

_A_u_t_h_o_r(_s):

     Gordon Smyth

_S_e_e _A_l_s_o:

     An overview of LIMMA functions for reading data is given in
     3.ReadingData.

