l want to conduct an experiment to effects 3 soil moisture levels on gene expression in hybrid maize seedlings. l a m going to grow 36 seedlings in 12 pots with three seedlings per plots . The 3 moisture levels (low, medium and high ) are going to be randomly assigned to 12 pots with 4 plots for each soil moisture level. After 3 weeks RNA will be extracted from above ground tissues of each seedling. Each of the 36 RNA samples are to hybridized to a microarray slide to measure gene expression.
What are treatments,experimental units, observational units and variable in the experiment?
I am not sure about the source of your seed, Is it GMO or hybrid or what? If not, what "Gene expression" is doing here?
Do you want to evaluate a certain gene's expression or want to evaluate which genes down/up regulate? Do you want to use "Chip" or another method? Please be more spesific.
thanks for correction , i have edited it. I think it is now making sense. sometimes we learn from our own mistakes
I am not sure if I understand it well, but follow my answer:
Treatments - Soil moisture level
Experimental Units - It depends. Will you evaluate the seedlings separately in each pot ? If the answer is yes each seedling if not each plot with 3 seedlings.
Observational Units - Each plot
Variable - Gene expression.
@suemar Avelar after a discussion my agronomy student mates ..we agreed that Treatments =soil moisture levels ; experimental units =plots; observational units =each plot and variable is gene expression ..so i think it is a good answer.
Firsttly, you need to define if your seedlings will get water stressed? roots and shoot?
Dear Laston,
Firstly, you need to include a control (full-watering) treatment as a referene point in your experment.
In relation to your question, I will suggest you to consider four treatments: Control, low, medium and high soil moisture stress. So, the experimental unit is a pot with three seedlings; each seedling in the pot should be considered as an individual observation and at the end you, if may perform an Anova with a mean of three observations in each pot x four replicates= the means you obtain will come from 12 individual observations, which will give you a good estimation of your measures.
With my very best regards,
Cándido López-Castañeda
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