[BioC] problems with Affy vignette and affybatch objects

Jenny Drnevich drnevich at uiuc.edu
Tue Oct 31 17:58:54 CET 2006


Hi all,

Thanks to Martin, Seth, and Jim for pointing out that my trouble was 
because I was using objects that had been created with a previous version 
of R and Bioconductor. I have seen this issue mentioned before on the 
mailing list, but I didn't think about it being the cause of my problems 
because 1) I mistakenly thought I was working with new data, instead of 
realizing I was checking on something in a previous analysis, and 2) in my 
mind the postings before had to do with people using the development 
versions of R and Bioconductor (I remembered that 'updatePackages' at that 
time was in the development version of Biobase). Now, I know my memory is 
faulty, so I went back and looked at the release news items for R and 
Bioconductor. There was nothing in the Bioconductor 1.9 news release to 
indicate that previous data objects should be re-made or updated with 
'updateObjects'. I did find something in the R news (which I usually don't 
read - I know, shame on me) in the CHANGES TO S4 METHODS section, but it 
would not be apparent to the _typical_ PC Bioconductor user, if I may so 
stereotype myself and others this way, that this applies to AffyBatch, 
eSet, etc. objects. Was there an announcement from Bioconductor in an 
obvious place along the lines that due to changes in R for S4 classes, data 
objects made with previous versions should be re-created or updated using 
'updateObjects'? Perhaps there should have been, but if there was one and I 
just missed it, I apologize.

'updateObjects' appeared to work fine on my AffyBatch object, but when I 
used it on an exprSet object created by 'gcrma', the updated object was 
still an exprSet object. I thought stuff was going to switch to 
expressionSet objects - what's the difference between an exprSet and an 
expressionSet? Or is this something the casual user doesn't need to know 
about for now?

Thanks,
Jenny

P.S. I did finally get my own postings to the list, after about 5-8 hour 
delay... we'll see how long it take me to get this one!


At 05:25 PM 10/30/2006, Martin Morgan wrote:
>Hi Jenny --
>
>I think the problem is that your data 'raw' was created with R 2.3.1
>or earlier. R 2.4.0 introduced a change to the way these data
>structures are represented, and unfortunately did so in a way that
>messes up the 'show' methods. Make a backup of your data, then try
>this:
>
>library(affy)
>load("raw.rda") # load your data
>rawUpdt <- updateObject(rawUpdt)
>
>rawUpdt should now behave better. Check it carefully (you might try
>str(rawUpdt) to get an overview of the contents) to see that
>updateObject has not done anything bad -- it's a general purpose
>function from Biobase, rather than a function written to handle
>AffyBatch objects in particular.
>
>The problem with the vignette is that the affybatch.example data is
>also in the old format; we'll try to fix that from this end.
>
>There were some changes to affy in the last release cycle -- these
>were generally documentation changes or bug fixes that appear to be
>minor. More detail can be found in the links from the page at
>
>http://bioconductor.org/news
>
>Thanks for the report; please let me know if you encounter problems
>updating your data.
>
>Martin
>
>Jenny Drnevich <drnevich at uiuc.edu> writes:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > There's some problem with the default value for affybatch objects (if this
> > is the correct description) that's appeared in affy 1.12.0, which also can
> > be seen in the affy vignette. Previously, when I typed in the name of an
> > affybatch object at the command line, I'd get the same output as if I had
> > put 'show(abatch)':
> >
> >  > raw
> > AffyBatch object
> > size of arrays=602x602 features (53806 kb)
> > cdf=RAE230A (15923 affyids)
> > number of samples=19
> > number of genes=15923
> > annotation=rae230a
> >
> >  > show(raw)
> > AffyBatch object
> > size of arrays=602x602 features (53806 kb)
> > cdf=RAE230A (15923 affyids)
> > number of samples=19
> > number of genes=15923
> > annotation=rae230a
> >
> >  > sessionInfo()
> > Version 2.3.1 Patched (2006-08-06 r38829)
> > i386-pc-mingw32
> >
> > attached base packages:
> > [1] "splines"   "tools"     "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices"
> > [7] "utils"     "datasets"  "base"
> >
> > other attached packages:
> >     rae230acdf  affyQCReport    simpleaffy    reposTools         made4
> >       "1.12.0"      "1.10.0"       "2.6.0"      "1.10.0"       "1.6.0"
> > scatterplot3d          ade4       affyPLM         gcrma   matchprobes
> >       "0.3-24"       "1.4-1"       "1.8.0"       "2.4.1"       "1.4.0"
> >       affydata affycoretools       GOstats      Category      hgu95av2
> >        "1.8.0"       "1.4.0"       "1.6.0"       "1.4.1"      "1.12.0"
> >           KEGG      multtest    genefilter      survival        xtable
> >       "1.12.0"      "1.10.2"      "1.10.1"        "2.26"       "1.3-2"
> >           RBGL      annotate            GO         graph         Ruuid
> >        "1.8.1"      "1.10.0"      "1.12.0"      "1.10.6"      "1.10.0"
> >          limma          affy        affyio       Biobase       RWinEdt
> >        "2.7.9"      "1.10.0"       "1.0.0"      "1.10.1"       "1.7-4"
> >
> > However, now when I just type in the name of the affybatch object, the
> > entire contents of the affybatch object is output! (current sessionInfo
> > below). This is also in the vignette (October 3, 2006), on page 11-251 
> (did
> > no one notice the vignette was 271 pages long?!?). I had noticed that the
> > previous vignette from affy 1.10.0 (April 25, 2006) was also 271 pages 
> long
> > when called from my installation, but at the time when I went back and
> > checked on the Bioconductor website, the vignette listed there was the
> > right length. I thought the problem had been corrected, and since I wasn't
> > having any trouble typing in the name of the affybatch object to get the
> > summary, I didn't report it.
> >
> > One last thing - were there no changes to affy for the Bioconductor 1.9
> > release? The beginning of the vignette (Oct 3, 2006) still has listed
> > 'Changes for affy in BioC 1.8 release' in section 2, along with all the
> > same information as in the previous vignette.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jenny
> >
> >  >raw
> > #many, many, many lines deleted...
> > a18   15     4   1
> > a19   15     4   2
> > a20   15     5   1
> > a21   15     5   2
> > Slot "varLabels":
> > Slot "varLabels":$Week
> > [1] "Week"
> >
> > Slot "varLabels":$Group
> > [1] "Group"
> >
> > Slot "varLabels":$Rep
> > [1] "Replicate"
> >
> > Slot "varMetadata":
> > NULL data frame with 0 rows
> >
> >  > show(raw)
> > AffyBatch object
> > size of arrays=602x602 features (53806 kb)
> > cdf=RAE230A (15923 affyids)
> > number of samples=19
> > number of genes=15923
> > annotation=rae230a
> >
> >  > sessionInfo()
> > R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)
> > i386-pc-mingw32
> >
> > locale:
> > LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
> > States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
> > States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
> >
> > attached base packages:
> > [1] "splines"   "tools"     "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices"
> > [7] "utils"     "datasets"  "base"
> >
> > other attached packages:
> >     rae230acdf  affyQCReport    simpleaffy         made4 scatterplot3d
> >       "1.14.0"      "1.12.0"       "2.8.0"       "1.8.0"      "0.3-24"
> >           ade4       affyPLM         gcrma   matchprobes      affydata
> >        "1.4-2"      "1.10.0"       "2.6.0"       "1.6.0"      "1.10.0"
> > affycoretools       biomaRt         RCurl           XML       GOstats
> >        "1.6.0"       "1.8.0"       "0.7-0"     "0.99-93"       "2.0.0"
> >       Category    genefilter      survival          KEGG          RBGL
> >        "2.0.0"      "1.12.0"        "2.29"      "1.14.0"      "1.10.0"
> >       annotate            GO         graph         limma          affy
> >       "1.12.0"      "1.14.0"      "1.12.0"       "2.9.1"      "1.12.0"
> >         affyio       Biobase       RWinEdt
> >        "1.2.0"      "1.12.0"       "1.7-5"
> >  >
> >
> >
> >
> > Jenny Drnevich, Ph.D.
> >
> > Functional Genomics Bioinformatics Specialist
> > W.M. Keck Center for Comparative and Functional Genomics
> > Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center
> > University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
> >
> > 330 ERML
> > 1201 W. Gregory Dr.
> > Urbana, IL 61801
> > USA
> >
> > ph: 217-244-7355
> > fax: 217-265-5066
> > e-mail: drnevich at uiuc.edu
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bioconductor mailing list
> > Bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioconductor
> > Search the archives: 
> http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.biology.informatics.conductor
>
>--
>Martin T. Morgan
>Bioconductor / Computational Biology
>http://bioconductor.org



More information about the Bioconductor mailing list