Similarity plots based on correlation and median absolute deviation (MAD); adjusting colors for heatmaps; aggregate technical replicates; calculate pairwise fold-changes and log fold-changes; compute one- and two-way ANOVA; simplified interface to package 'limma' (Ritchie et al. (2015), ) for moderated t-test and one-way ANOVA; Hamming and Levenshtein (edit) distance of strings as well as optimal alignment scores for global (Needleman-Wunsch) and local (Smith-Waterman) alignments with constant gap penalties (Merkl and Waack (2009), ISBN:978-3-527-32594-8).