I've a table with HUGO gene symbols in it. When I load the table in R using read.table(), one of the genes in the list NA (neuroacanthocytosis) is treated as a missing value. I would like NA to be as a normal character string rather than a missing value. I've tried to convert NA to a normal text/character but I've not been successful yet. And I did not find any of such problems mentioned previously in any forums. How can we overcome this issue?