NB. this content is reposted from an article I wrote for the NZSBMB "Southern Blot" newsletter.
I thought I’d talk about something else, something I find particularly interesting: Negative Controls4! I have worked with researchers who proudly talk about how many lanes of their gels are dedicated to their negative controls, and I’m sure all researchers spend a lot of time and effort on developing appropriate negative controls. Which is great. Yet, some researchers when they move from the wet-lab to sitting in front of a computer will forget about running negative controls on their bioinformatic experiments too. I did mention this issue in my talk in the context of our investigation into the interplay behind the speed and accuracy of bioinformatic tools3.
I thought I’d talk about something else, something I find particularly interesting: Negative Controls4! I have worked with researchers who proudly talk about how many lanes of their gels are dedicated to their negative controls, and I’m sure all researchers spend a lot of time and effort on developing appropriate negative controls. Which is great. Yet, some researchers when they move from the wet-lab to sitting in front of a computer will forget about running negative controls on their bioinformatic experiments too. I did mention this issue in my talk in the context of our investigation into the interplay behind the speed and accuracy of bioinformatic tools3.
Negative Controls are a backbone of research, and an important component of the definition of P-values that are frequently used to report the significance of findings 5 (the “null” distribution/hypothesis is of course a form of negative control).
