A big news from MIT: MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers develop a technique to cure a broad range of viruses

Dr. Todd Rider and his team have developed and demonstrated a novel broad-spectrum antiviral approach, called DRACO (for Double-stranded RNA dsRNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer). DRACO selectively induces apoptosis, or cell suicide, in cells containing any viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. As a result, DRACO should be effective against virtually all viruses, rapidly terminating a viral infection while minimizing the impact on the patient.

BUT, Should DRACO be effective against virtually all viruses?

I think there are many problem. First, DRACO can only senses double-stranded RNA, and DRACO just senses long ( >~23nt ) dsRNA, so it just can senses a limit of viruses. Second, DRACO is a chimeric protein, how to delivery it into our body without proteolysis? The delivery mechanism may a big problem. Third, viruses have some tricks use to inhibit apoptosis. So, DRACOs seems not effective against virually all viruses.

BTW: Is Dr. Todd a fan of Harry Potter ? ;)

I haven’t check my code for 7 years ago, thanks to all the visitors who left a comment.

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[How to do with R] is a category about use R to deal with problems. Maybe you can use web search find this, when you have the same problems.

I need to calculate “number of times” same word appear in some text documents. There are many ways to do it. One simple way is using R. To calculate word frequencies have three mainly steps.

• Read the text into R.
• Split sentence into words.
• Calculate word frequencies.

R can read any text file using readLines() or scan().

readLines("Textname.txt",encoding="UTF-8")
scan("Textname.txt","character",sep="\n")

Reference: Reading and writing text files

Use strsplit to split sentence into words.

strsplit(string,"")

Reference: ?strsplit

Use table to calculate word frequencies.

table(sentences)

Reference: ?table

Hear is a Example

Calculate word frequencies in TEXTname.txt

TEXTname.txt: It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.

sentences<-scan("TEXTname.txt","character",sep="\n");
#Replace full stop and comma
sentences<-gsub("\\.","",sentences)
sentences<-gsub("\\,","",sentences)
#Split sentence
words<-strsplit(sentences," ")
#Calculate word frequencies
words.freq<-table(unlist(words));

The source code can be found in github

Result:
cbind(names(words.freq),as.integer(words.freq)) ## You might consider using cbind.data.frame instead of cbind

  [1,] "age" "2"
  [2,] "before" "2"
  [3,] "belief" "1"
  [4,] "Darkness" "1"
  [5,] "despair" "1"
  [6,] "epoch" "2"
  [7,] "everything" "1"
  [8,] "foolishness" "1"
  [9,] "had" "2"
  [10,] "hope" "1"
  [11,] "incredulity" "1"
  [12,] "it" "7"
  [13,] "It" "1"
  [14,] "Light" "1"
  [15,] "nothing" "1"
  [16,] "of" "8"
  [17,] "season" "2"
  [18,] "spring" "1"
  [19,] "the" "8"
  [20,] "us" "2"
  [21,] "was" "8"
  [22,] "we" "2"
  [23,] "winter" "1"
  [24,] "wisdom" "1"

Hello world! This site is my first English blog. You can contact me in this page.