This tutorial shows how to import non-numerical data in a BioNumerics database and link the data to a character type experiment. It illustrates the use of character mappings in BioNumerics. Character mappings in BioNumerics are used to map categorical names (e.g. Present/Absent, Yes/No, Susceptible/Intermediate/Resistant, etc.) to character values (e.g. 0 and 1) or a range of values to according to predefined criteria.
Characters
A character is basically a name-value pair of which the value can be binary, multi-state or continuous. Because of this very broad definition, a wide variety of data can be analyzed as character types (= an array of characters). This includes morphological and biochemical features, commercial test panels (API®, Biolog®, Vitek®, etc.), antibiotics resistance profiles, fatty acid profiles, microarrays, SNP arrays, repeat numbers in MLVA, allelic profiles in MLST, etc.
MS Excel file, containing presence and absence information for four genes.