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Lab Statistics & Math

What to Expect When Working with a Scientific Recruiter

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if someone helped you step-by-step through your job search? A good recruiter does exactly that! Recruiters provide value to job-seekers by reviewing resumes, finding jobs that may be a good fit, and providing interview tips. But how does that process work? In this article we’ll cover…

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Size-Selection Is Essential for Cell-Free DNA Studies

Advances in using cell-free DNA (cfDNA) to glean clinically meaningful information for a patient have been stunning. For the most part, these research studies (or downstream diagnostic tests) isolate fetal DNA in the mother’s blood or tumor-derived DNA from the background of healthy DNA in the bloodstream. Typically known as liquid biopsies, these minimally invasive…

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Mysterious miRNA: Identifying miRNAs and Their Targets

In my first article on this topic we delved into what miRNAs are, how they are generated, and their function. Now, we are going to discuss how to identify miRNAs and their targets. Why Do You Want to Look at Something So Small Anyhow? miRNAs play a crucial role in most physiological processes. It’s not…

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How Many Data Points Do I Need For My Experiment?

To draw a convincing conclusion from your data, you cannot simply shoot for the standard significance cutoff. You also need to consider the statistical power, which is determined in part by the sample size in your experiment.

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Choose the Statistical Package that Will Make Your Data Talk

In the last years, the need for using statistical testing in bioscience has grown exponentially and so has the development of statistical software. It is now common that everyone is using some sort of stats in their basic research. Among the skillful biostatisticians, R is the most popular software for data analysis, but not all…

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Brushing Up On Your Excel Skills: Part One

Microsoft Excel can be a really powerful, useful tool for certain kinds of data processing and record keeping, and the chances are you probably don’t even know how to use half of the functions it comes with! That’s OK, personally, I find Excel a bit less user-friendly than Word, but also it’s a programme I…

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Polymerase Incomplete Primer Extension (PIPE) Cloning Method

PIPE PCR is a ligase-independent, restriction enzyme-free cloning strategy like SLIC (link to my SLIC article), SLiCE and CPEC. The PIPE method eliminates sequence constraints and reduces cloning and site mutagenesis to a single PCR step followed by product treatment. It is fast, cost-effective and highly efficient. The key step is designing the primers; one…

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Analyzing Apoptosis – A Review of Analytical Techniques

Now that we’ve learned about the role of apoptosis in good health and disease, it will be useful to know how we can detect apoptosis in cells or organisms. A variety of apoptosis detection kits are commercially available, and here is a roundup of how they work: TUNEL and DNA damage assays The TUNEL assay…

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Ten Non-Chemical Lab Hazards and What They Do to You!

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…

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The Establishment of the Nobel Prize

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…

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R You Ready? Using R for Statistical Tests

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…

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An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Exploratory Data Analysis

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…

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Let’s Talk About Stats: Comparing Multiple Datasets

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…

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Let’s Talk About Stats: Understanding the Lingo

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…

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How to Deal With a Failed Experiment

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…

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A Guide for Solving Your Lab Math Problems

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…

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Show Us Your Moves: Making an MSD Plot

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…

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An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Basic Tutorial

So now you’re convinced that R is the language for you, you’ve downloaded R-Studio (from https://www.rstudio.com/) and opened it, and. . .what the hell do you do now? Great question! I always find it easiest to learn by doing something, rather than just by seeing a list of possibilities, so here I’ll walk you through…

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An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research – Introduction

Working with large datasets can be very frustrating and time consuming.  If only there were more tools out there to simplify things without needing to invest a PhD’s worth of time to learn how to use them! I am here to tell you that there is a solution, and a free one at that. If…

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Statistics: A Good P-value is Not Enough

Like many scientists, I don’t consider myself a statistics expert. But I am determined to do things right in my science, and that includes statistics. In my experience, a lot of scientists who are “scared” of statistics fall into the trap of ignoring the existence of anything beyond a t-test. But using the right method…

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Time for T: How to Use the Student’s T-test

To pull together our discussions so far on hypothesis testing and p-values, we will use the t distribution as an example to see how it all works. The t distribution (you may have heard it called Student’s t) is a probability distribution that looks like a bell-shaped curve (or normal distribution). If we sample repeatedly from…

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Pseudoreplication: Don’t Fall For This Simple Statistical Mistake

Now we come to the third part of our trifecta; in the last two posts I have gone over p-values and how they determine significance in null hypothesis testing, and we talked about degrees of freedom and their effect on the p-value. Finally, we come to pseudoreplication: where it can all go terribly wrong. Replication…

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How Free is Your Degree?

In the last post I talked about p-values and how we define significance in null hypothesis testing. P-values are inherently linked to degrees of freedom; a lack of knowledge about degrees of freedom invariably leads to poor experimental design, mistaken statistical tests and awkward questions from peer reviewers or conference attendees. Even if you think…

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Don’t Be Another P-value Victim

In previous articles, I’ve primed you on hypothesis testing and how we are forced to choose between minimising either Type I or Type II errors. In the world of the null hypothesis fetish, the p-value (p) is the most revered number. It may also be the least understood. The p-value is the probability, assuming the…

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Types of Statistical Errors and What They Mean

This column is loaded with pop quizzes for you to test yourself on. If you haven’t already done so, catch up on yesterday’s piece on hypothesis testing for a refresher. Take a gander at the table below for a summary of the two types of error that can result from hypothesis testing. Type I Errors occur…

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A Primer on Statistical Hypotheses

Hypothesis testing is the foundation around which we prove our science is worth funding, publishing and sitting through a conference presentation for. I can’t overstate the  importance of understanding hypothesis testing, such is the integral part it plays in biological analyses. The Null Hypothesis Fundamental to statistics is the concept of a null hypothesis, and…

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Why You Should Care More About Statistics

In this, the first in a series of articles on statistics, I want to set out some of the main reasons why you, as a biologist, should improve your knowledge of statistics. The general consensus is that biologists are not strong when it comes to statistics. There’s nothing in our brains that stops us from…

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Error Bars in Biology

….statistics. The very word strikes fear into the heart of many a biologist (including me). In an article published earlier this year, Cumming and co-workers of La Trobe University, Melbourne gave a very useful rundown of common mistakes made when using statistical error bars in biology and suggested a number of rules that should be…

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