Thursday, December 10, 2020

Take the fun out of single cell proteomics with false positive rates in quantification!


Is the fact that the hospitals near you are very very full and you're...injury prone...making it hard for you to sleep at night? Or are you just too excited by the promise of single cell proteomic technology and need to reign it in a little? 

Do I ever have the study for you! 

Why the annoying title for this blog post? Because it would be so much more fun to not think about relative errors in quantification in this exciting and emerging field of single cell proteomics. Let's focus on the positive! Do I want to know that the relative error in protein quantification tends to head in a suboptimal direction as the number of relative cells in an experiment decreases? 


Is it important to know? 

Of course it is! 

But it's even more important to know what those relative errors are as you scale down so we can start to think about clever ways to adjust for these errors, like how many replicates would you need to do to make them better?

Mad props to this group for trudging through and doing the work that I know I sure didn't want to do and making the graphs that no one hanging out at a single cell sorters wants to think about and really truly absolutely need to! 

Oh, and this is probably a much better summary of the study: 



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