algorithms and their implementation To facilitate software improvements through bug fixing and plug-ins To encourage good scientific computing and statistical practice by providing appropriate tools and instruction To provide a workbench of tools that allow researchers to explore and expand the methods used to analyze biological data To ensure that the international scientific community is the owner of the software tools needed to carry out research To lead and encourage commercial support and development of those tools that are successful To promote reproducible research by providing open and accessible tools with which to carry out that research (reproducible research is distinct from independent verification) Open development. Users are encouraged to become developers, either by contributing Bioconductor compliant packages or documentation. Additionally Bioconductor provides a mechanism for linking together different groups with common goals to foster collaboration on software, possibly at the level of shared development. Milestones Each release of Bioconductor is developed to work best with a chosen version of R. In addition to bugfixes and updates, a new release typically adds packages. The table below maps a Bioconductor release to a R version and shows the number of available Bioconductor software packages for that release. Resources See also Computational biology Bioinformatics List of open source bioinformatics software List of sequence alignment software R (programming language) DNA microarray Affymetrix, a microarray technology platform References External links The R Project GNU R is a programming language for statistical computing. Bioconductor Releases The community of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution strives towards an automated building of BioConductor packages for their distribution. BioKnoppix and Quantian are projects extending Knoppix that have contributed bootable Debian GNU/Linux CDs providing BioConductor installations. Free bioinformatics software Free R (programming language) software Science software for macOS Science software for Windows Science software for Linux