Using this module, it is possible to define any array of named characters, binary or continuous, with fixed or undefined length. The size of a character type in BioNumerics can range from one single character (e.g. a morphological feature) to microarray experiments of many thousands of gene expression values. Further adjustable features include the range of the characters, the number of digits, the color scale, similarity coefficients used for comparison, etc.

Examples of character types include morphological and biochemical features, metabolic assimilation or enzyme activity test panels such as API®, Biolog®, Vitek®, antibiotics resistance profiles, fatty acid profiles, microarray differential expression values, etc.

Character sets are also be used by plugins to store the result of processed data from other sources, for example, copy numbers in electrophoresis-based MLVA, allele numbers in sequence-based MLST, zygosity in band scoring, resistance profiles in HIV drug resistance analysis, etc.

BioNumerics’ powerful script language and ODBC functions allow for direct import of data from external databases or from text-formatted files or Excel spreadsheets.