The Statistical Significance of Biological Data

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...

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

Statistical Significance of Data T-test, ANOVA

Here x is a numeric vector of data values and y is an optional numeric vector of data values. If y is excluded, the function performs a one-sample t-test on the data contained in x, if it is included it performs a two-sample t-tests using both x and y. The option mu provides a number indicating the true value of the mean (or difference in means if you are performing a two sample test) under the...

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...