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To follow up, the papers can sometimes be deliberately vague with respect to actual volumes/masses/materials, as theoretically ...

To follow up, the papers can sometimes be deliberately vague with respect to actual volumes/masses/materials, as theoretically the concentration, & activity and other state-functions sufficiently describe the system. The exact DNA sequence I use might be important, but if I just say I used gene, 'hGENE1', that should be sufficient for the published science. Sure, my hGene1 might have a mutation, or yours might, but we'd never learn that if we just kept passing around the same plasmid, calling it hGene1 (I'm looking at you, cell-lines...). That you used brand-X tubes should generally not be important to the science (conceptually, though sometimes they are physically), and so should be left out of the paper's protocol precisely so that another lab does not use that tube during a replication study. It's not bad science that using brand-X tube yields different results than brand-Y tube, though it can be frustrating to learn that is the crux of the difference you've been seeing. It is precisely that kind of variable that must be ferreted out, and can often only be ferreted out when labs attack the same problem from a different angle.

Posted by toufka on Jun 27, 2015, 4:31 PM

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To follow up, the papers can sometimes be deliberately vague with respect to actual volumes/masses/materials, as theoretically ...

toufkaJun 27, 2015, 4:31 PM

To follow up, the papers can sometimes be deliberately vague with respect to actual volumes/masses/materials, as theoretically the concentration, & activity and other state-functions sufficiently describe the system. The exact DNA sequence I use might be important, but if I just say I used gene, 'hGENE1', that should be sufficient for the published science. Sure, my hGene1 might have a mutation, or yours might, but we'd never learn that if we just kept passing around the same plasmid, calling it hGene1 (I'm looking at you, cell-lines...). That you used brand-X tubes should generally not be important to the science (conceptually, though sometimes they are physically), and so should be left out of the paper's protocol precisely so that another lab does not use that tube during a replication study. It's not bad science that using brand-X tube yields different results than brand-Y tube, though it can be frustrating to learn that is the crux of the difference you've been seeing. It is precisely that kind of variable that must be ferreted out, and can often only be ferreted out when labs attack the same problem from a different angle.

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