Question: do you use biological sampling to collect your information? if so, where does it get used?

Kathryn McMahon answered on 20 Mar 2013:

I have to say that this isn’t a term we use in molecular biology (its something I associate with using quadrats in a field), although we do use sampling techniques. For example, if we’re looking at slices of tumour we use a spot sampling method to look at the blood vessels. Basically, we have a computer programme that comes with 10 randomly positioned arrows and puts them on top of an image of the tumour section. We then look at the cells directly next to the arrows. We might score them for whether they have stained for a marker or gene we’re interested in, measure their size, or count the number of blood vessels next to arrows in each slice. It helps to take human bias out of our results. I hope that makes sense!