Can a bioinformatics analysis based on 2 patient samples be published

Question

[ChIP]

Dear Community,

This question is not directly linked to any kind of analysis problem but it highlights a problem of number of samples taken into account.

Lets have a look at a case: A bioinformatician gets 2 patient samples from a research lab. on these two patient samples experiments like ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, DNA methylation, sequencing for few epigenetic marks and RNA-seq have been performed. The bioinformatician analysis the available omic data and compares the result with the previous published results where the patients of the same disease responded to a drug treatment and reasons it with possible causes why the given patient samples did not respond to drug treatment.

Now the question is, since this whole analysis and results comparison and conclusion are based on two patient samples, wouldn't this story be slammed by the reviewers as it lacks number of patient samples to give or support any concrete conclusion?

Kindly give your comments.

Thank you

[pld]

What are your controls in this case and what are differences between your two patients (e.g. demographics, health, etc)?

Answer 1

[Devon Ryan]

It depends on where you try to publish it and what sorts of conclusions you try to draw. On the clinical side, this is very similar to a "case report", perhaps being a small step up ("up" in terms of the hierarchy of medical evidence). If one were to present something like this in that context then I suspect it'd get a fair review...the trick will be finding non-physicians that are familiar with this style and it's utility (try requesting reviewers that have previously worked on obscure human genetics or clinical bioinformatics sorts of things).