Bioconductor is a project to develop and curate a collection of R packages used for analysis of genetic data (specifically, analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data). With the wealth of genetic data on humans and animals now available, Bioconductor is widely used in medical research to understand how genes influence our health, and to develop new therapies and drugs. (It was used in this recent Nature Molecular Psychiatry article, for example.)
The project currently includes 935 R packages — a tally that's not normally included in the count of available R packages (the count of package in CRAN currently stands at 6179). There are also 895 packages of genetic data (includeing many annotated genomes), and 223 packages of experimental data.
The latest issue of the Bioconductor newsletter shared some impressive statistics on the growth of the project:
- A search for BioConductor citations on Google Scholar yields more than 27,000 hits. (You can see a list of recent articles citing BioConductor here, including articles in Nature, Genome Biology, and Statistical Science.)
- Visits to the BioConductor website increased by 23% in 2014.
- 63 packages were added in the last 3 months of 2014.
- Package downloads have increased by 9%.
You can find much more news about the Bioconductor project in the current and previous Bioconductor newsletters. Start with the most revent issue at the link below.
Bioconductor Newsletter: January 2015
Interesting, impressive, and good to know.
Thansk David.
Posted by: Tal Galili | January 09, 2015 at 13:35