Statistical or biological significance?

Statistical significance in biological sequence analysis

One of the major goals of computational sequence analysis is to find sequence similarities, which could serve as evidence of structural and functional conservation, as well as of evolutionary relations among the sequences. Since the degree of similarity is usually assessed by the sequence alignment score, it is necessary to know if a score is high enough to indicate a biologically interesting a...

Statistical Significance in Biological Sequence Comparison1

The statistical significance of biological data.

The pathological and clinical (may I even say surgical ?) approach has thus furnished us with a working hypothesis on which the function of the thymus gland may eventually be elucidated. There are still many difficulties in the way of a final solution, and progress is likely to be slow. It may be thought safer to return for the present to Galen's belief that the thymus is just a cushion to prot...

Sibling Competition & Growth Tradeoffs. Biological vs. Statistical Significance

Early childhood growth has many downstream effects on future health and reproduction and is an important measure of offspring quality. While a tradeoff between family size and child growth outcomes is theoretically predicted in high-fertility societies, empirical evidence is mixed. This is often attributed to phenotypic variation in parental condition. However, inconsistent study results may al...

An illusion of hormesis in the Ames test: statistical significance is not equivalent to biological significance.

A recent report (Calabrese et al., Mutat. Res. 726 (2011) 91-97) concluded that an analysis of Ames test mutagenicity data provides evidence of hormesis in mutagenicity dose-response relationships. An examination of the data used in this study and the conclusions regarding hormesis reveal a number of concerns regarding the analyses and possible misinterpretations of the Salmonella data. The cla...