Dear Bioconductor List: I have a set of 2-D gel protein expression data stored in an excel spreedsheet. I created two comma delimited texte files from the excel spreadsheet: 1. phenoData with group names and covariate information and 2. expression data. I used the read.table function to create two data.frames in R: xxCov and xxData. I tried to use the new() function to create a "phenoData" object from the xxCov and a vector covN with varLabels. I get an error message "Invalid 'phenoData' object: FALSE". Queries for class() show both xxCov and xxData are data.frame objects. Is there some intermediate step I need to convert the data.frames to some other object? Keep in mind I am a novice R user. I am using R 1.8.1 with the latest Bioconductor release. Thank you, John Cornell