Examining the gills of a salmon.

CSIRO’s research into amoebic gill disease resistance in salmon is being helped by good experimental design.

Experimental design for high-throughput bioscience

CSIRO statisticians are helping bioscience researchers get the most out of their experiments.

  • 1 March 2006 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

High-throughput experiments enable bioscience researchers to collect more data in a day than they once could have gathered in a lifetime. Getting useful data however, requires smart experimental design.
 
CSIRO’s statistics-based research into experimental design focuses on:

  • developing methods to help researchers make the most of high-throughput experiments
  • collaborating with researchers to translate experimental design theory into practice.

Experimental design research

Many bioscience experiments involve two or more phases. For example, a microarray analysis to identify genes associated with salinity tolerance has two phases:

  • growing the plants in different salinity conditions
  • measuring gene expression in the plants by microarray assay.

Variability in the first phase of the experiment feeds into the second phase. Ignoring different sources of variation can lead to misleading conclusions. In this example a researcher might conclude that a gene is associated with salinity tolerance, when in fact the result was due to the way that the plants were laid out in the greenhouse.

Our research into experimental design is:

  • advancing the theory of two-phase experimental design
  • exploring the relative merits of alternating loop, dye-swap and other microarray experimental designs
  • investigating design strategies involving partial replication.
Massive amounts of data won’t save a badly designed experiment – talk to a statistician before you start collecting data!

Current projects

Experimental design theory needs to be applied before researchers can reap the benefits of better experiments.

Our current and past work includes:

  • research for the NSW Agricultural Genomics Centre to find genetic determinants of cotton fibre quality, wheat milling quality, and flour dough extensibility
  • investigation of methods for NIR (near infrared reflectance) measurement of durum vitreousness for BRI Australia
  • development of ways to generate durum vitreousness reference standards for AWB Ltd 
  • research for CSIRO’s Food Futures National Research Flagship to find genetic determinants of amoebic gill disease resistance in salmon
  • analysis of quality traits for the Australian National Mango Breeding Program
  • analysis of the genetic determinants of bovine ocular neoplasia (eye cancer in cows).

Find out more about CSIRO’s work in Agribusiness.