• Question: How long does it take to make accurate tests?

    Asked by TheQuestionableChemist571 to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 15 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      Hi QuestionableChemist,

      That’s a great question! It will depend on the sort of test you are doing, to work out whether it is accurate or not.

      In tests I do in biology (where I try to kill parasites with drugs), I make sure I include lots of ‘controls’ in the experiments. The controls allow me to have faith in the results I obtain from my experiments. For example, I will test the parasites, but also do my experiments with no parasites present, or on parasites that I don’t treat with drugs. This makes sure I have experiments to compare to and make sure my tests haven’t gone wrong somewhere.

      Hannah

    • Photo: Jenny Batson

      Jenny Batson answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      Hi
      It depends what tests you are doing. The first experiment we do with our chemicals is to see how well they inhibit our target protein. This experiment only takes 2 hours for 10 chemicals but it took me a few weeks to make the experiment accurate to start with and I’m still finding ways to improve it after 2 years! We can test how accurate it is using known drugs and by including or excluding part of the experiment to see how that affects the overall result. Other experiments are more complicated though and can take a couple of weeks to do. A lot of the time people have already worked out how to make most experiments accurate and we just have to use that or change it slightly for our work and make sure it still works!
      Jenny

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 18 Nov 2016:

      Hiya,

      That’s an excellent question!

      It depends on what experiments your doing…. you always need to include the appropriate controls, which are typically what your testing but without anything added, as well as positive and negative controls. This can be something that works really well if you have it, and something which has no effect too!

      Then you also most of the time need to perform each experiment 3 times, to make sure that the results are reliable and reproducible!

      Some experiments also need you to test each sample more than once too… for my toxicity experiments I test each same 8 times, and then do that 3 times!

      Steve

Comments