We know that turnover rates of many metabolites inside cells can be very rapid, and it is important to analyze them at a very fast manner.
How would one explain that " the turnover rate of the intracellular metabolome is really fast " and yet, we still need to analyze another cell culture/sample under the same condition and expect them to demonstrate some kind of repeatability? How can we make the comparison between the metabolomics profiles in cells under different culturing conditions? I mean, we can compare the results we obtain from experiments after normalization, but is that accurate?
It is an interesting question and I do not claim to have the answer, however I think that the number of biological replicates in ones study should be enough to have an idea of the intra-group biological variability (and also account for your culturing conditions variability) and then hope (or expect) that your condition (treatment, mutant, environmental condition, etc) will have a much larger effect than that of your inter-group variation. Hope it makes sense.
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