• Question: What are some of the most important pieces of equipment that you use and what are they needed for? Are there any improvements that could be made to possibly make your results more accurate?

    Asked by morgancope to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi @morgancope
      The most important thing I need is a piece of software called STATA. This can take all my data (just loads and loads of numbers basically) and turn it in to meaningful test statistics and graphs, showing me what all the numbers actually mean to my research question.

      In order to get some of the numbers a team of people called ‘field workers’ collect the information from the participants in the study, and enter them in to the computer. They also take blood samples, and these are analysed by fancy machines to work out the genetic code in the participants’ cells.

      There are always things that could make results more accurate, but as always it’s a choice between spending more money, or making do with what you have and only replacing machines when they need to be. There are more cutting edge genetics machines available, but the ones we have still work fine and are not much less accurate, so it would be wasteful to replace them just yet.

      Hope this answers your question.

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