Lab Statistics & Math

Your lab is full of non-chemical hazards that can explode, stab, kill, and – as if that wasn’t enough – bite.  Here’s a list of those hazards to remind you why Environmental Health & Safety exists! 1.  Centrifuges Centrifuges are dangerous, especially when not cared for!  An unmaintained ultracentrifuge imploded in an American lab in…

Let’s play a game. I’ll say a word and you say what comes to your mind. Ready? Go! Cat… Kitchen… Doctor… Airplane… Nobel… I have no idea what you said when I said cat but I’d say most of you said “prize” when I said Nobel. Alfred Nobel’s name is most often remembered because of…

The thing that was most difficult for me as an R beginner was plotting graphs with error bars – there is no concise way to do this with base graphics. There are workarounds, often using the ‘arrows’ command, but isn’t there a simpler way? Yes, in fact there are a handful of plotting packages for…

We’ve been slowly coaxing you along in our R tutorials.  We’ve introduced what R is, gave you a basic tutorial into how to use R and also spent some time learning how to explore your data with R. By now you are probably itching to use R for more complicated analyses.  To indulge you, I…

As you’ve probably kind of guessed from our previous articles Introducng R and the Basic R Tutorial, we think R programming language and R-studio are great tools for data analysis and figure production.  And now we are about to prove it! So, you’ve collected some data and are pretty sure you know what statistical test…

So you’ve performed a test such as an ANOVA and have found that there is statistical significance in your data (lucky you!), however you now want to know where that significance lies. When you are comparing multiple sets of data it might seem like a logical thought to simply perform an individual t-test between each…

Last week I focused on the left-hand side of this diagram and talked about statistical tests for comparing only two datasets.  Unfortunately, many experiments are more complicated and have three or more datasets.  Different statistical tests are used for comparing multiple data sets. Today I will focus on the right side of the diagram and…

There are so may statistical tests out there it can be difficult to determine which is the right test to use. Below is a simple diagram to help you quickly determine which test is right for you. Although this is by no means a comprehensive guide, it includes some of the most common tests and…

The first hurdle in learning about statistics is the language.  It’s terrible to be reading about a particular statistical test and have to be looking up the meaning of every third word. The type of data you have, the number of measurements, the range of your data values and how your data cluster are all…

Scientific success is often defined by how well your experiments progress and the results you produce. However, scientific research is driven by a curiosity about the unknown, and you cannot always be prepared for the unknown. Inevitably there will come a time when your experiments fail. In this article I give you some of the…

Recently, we wrote an article highlighting the prevalence of science-themed tattoos among scientists, and the particular significance these tattoos have among those who choose to get them (https://bitesizebio.com/articles/beneath-the-lab-coat-why-do-scientists-get-inked/). As a follow-up, we reached out to our readers to collect images and stories about their unique, science-themed tattoos. Some of you were kind enough to share…

The clock strikes 10:00 pm, your thumb has a raging case of carpal tunnel syndrome, the trash is full of tubes containing unsuccessful PCR reactions, and you wonder…Is this really what I want to do with my life? How do you get your mojo back when you’re knee deep in research?  One option to consider…

I was lucky enough to do my PhD in an extremely friendly and well-organised lab.  In my opinion, these two key traits are required for a successful research experience. This environment, while appearing effortless, was due in part to the hard work of the senior postdoc who kept the lab, and all of us, in…

Math is an important part of lab life, from making solutions to calculating protein concentrations, and miscalculations can cause mayhem for your experiments. Therefore it is important that your math is right, or you could spend weeks trying to figure out what’s going wrong in your experiments. I was hopeless at remembering how to do…

In the previous article, I showed you how to interpret mean-squared displacement (MSD) and showed four easy things you can learn from an MSD graph at a quick glance. Now let’s turn from analyzing an MSD plot to making one. I am going to use the programming language R to generate simulated data and then…