These are all `methods' of generic functions which are here applied to
DNA sequences stored as objects of class "DNAbin". They are
used in the same way than the standard R functions to manipulate
vectors, matrices, and lists. Additionally, the operators [[
and $ may be used to extract a vector from a list. Note that
the default of drop is not the same than the generic operator:
this is to avoid dropping rownames when selecting a single sequence.
These functions are provided to manipulate easily DNA sequences coded
with the bit-level coding scheme. The latter allows much faster
comparisons of sequences, as well as storing them in less memory
compared to the format used before ape 1.10.
For cbind, the default behaviour is to keep only individuals
(as indicated by the rownames) for which there are no missing data. If
fill.with.gaps = TRUE, a `complete' matrix is returned,
enventually with insertion gaps as missing data. If check.names
= TRUE (the default), the rownames of each matrix are checked, and
the rows are reordered if necessary. If check.names = FALSE,
the matrices must all have the same number of rows, and are simply
binded; the rownames of the first matrix are used. See the examples.
as.matrix may be used to convert DNA sequences (of the same
length) stored in a list into a matrix while keeping the names and the
class. as.list does the reverse operation.