We usually use Excel in our lab to analyse data, but I would like to take a course on a more sophisticated tool. Can you share which one is most common in molecular biology?
Thank you :)
Hi Claudia!
I do not know about molecular biology being the application, but I would say that R is probably one of the software that is the most used for statistical analysis in general (https://www.r-project.org/), so it should do.
Keeping in mind the open-source/free aspect, you also have the libraries available in Python, and I also heard of Scilab although I am not very familiar with this one.
Good luck!
This posted question is a vivid and, unfortunate, example of a wrong question.
The word 'analysis' is meaningless unless and until you clearly state the questions or problems that you want to get addressed.
Only if you have the right question you could analyze your data, and your analysis means that you can get the answer to your questions using some mathematical (statistical) methods. However, you will not get a meaningful answer if your question is wrong, or your data does not contain the right information for answering your question.
Next, getting simply a descriptive statistical summary such as data mean, standard deviation, etc. is NOT the same as data analysis.
The bottom line: always start with the question you want to get answered, then identify an appropriate method of analysis, i.e. the procedure that will get you to answer your question, then collect and prepare the needed data (beyond the simple descriptive statistical data summary), and only then feed the data into the analytical procedure, and then validate results of your analysis.
From my experience, about 90% of problems can be addressed with Excel using its multiple options including Add-in and solver, or using Graphical User Interface (GUI) statistical packages such as Minitab or SPSS.
If you want to spend months taking a course on learning to code in R or Python for sophistication purposes, that's fine. But I think it would be much more productive to focus on your particular molecular biology problem using Excel which is already well-known in your Lab.
Hi, thank you for your reply. I am sorry I missed the point, and did not express the question correctly. Working in the lab, at the end of the experiments we get results, a lot of numbers, values, I would like to be able to analyse them as a whole and interpret the results correctly.
I am a beginner in the field of biology, I am still a student, and I was wondering which software or tools are most commonly used.
Claudia, I understand your question very well,
there are several tools for data analysis, among which some for those who have no notion of programming are JASP, JAMOVI (I prefer the latter). and that also depend on the amount of data with which you work. Big data Phyton or R studio Server, low scale data quantity without doubt R.
See also my review here:Technical Report Farewell SPSS: Switching to free software in 2024