Evaluating Strategies to Normalise Biological Replicates of Western Blot Data
Figure 5
Effects of normalisation on false positives and false negatives when applying t-test for equality of the mean.
(A) We consider responses to eight conditions with log-normal distributions with CV of 0.2 and means of the conditions from 1 to 8 equal to: 1, 2, 2, 4, 7, 7, 18, 18. A number n = 5 of sampled replicates are obtained from these distributions and normalised using the normalisations above. Using these replicates before and after normalisation, conditions are tested using a two-tailed t-test with threshold p-value of 0.05. We repeat this procedure a large number of times and estimate the percentage of false positives. (B) In analogy with (A), we estimate the number of false negatives considering means of the conditions from 1 to 8 equal to: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10.5, 18, 27. Notice that for a fair comparison, when testing two conditions, one has a mean that is always 2/3 the mean of the other, e.g. Condition 5 has mean 7 and Condition 6 has mean 10.5, with 7/10.5 = 2/3.