Technical and Biological replicates

Question

[debitboro]

Hi all,

I apologize if the question is so naive (I'm a computer sciences engineer and I have not enough notions in biology and lab experiments). I have RNASeq data coming from the sequencing of 22 patients, for each patient two tissues are sequenced the normal and the tumor tissue, so we have 44 samples (22 tumors, 22 matched normal).

My question is about technical and biological replicates. In my case can I say that we have technical replicates if we consider a single patient because the two samples are grown in the same biological conditions (so, one tissue in control and one tissue in case condition), and biological replicates if we focus on all the patients because the samples are grown in different biological conditions (so, we have 22 replicates in each condition case and control).

Is this correct ?

Answer 1

[natasha.sernova]

See these post:

Technical Or Biological Replicate

and this paper:

http://www.illumina.com/Documents/products/technotes/technote_power_replicates.pdf

It may be also useful - RNA-experimental design:

http://scotty.genetics.utah.edu/help.html

Answer 2

[Chirag Parsania]

Hi,

As per my understanding you neither have technical nor biological replicates. If you have two same tumour type (for e.g. two blood cancer tumour) you can say they are biological replicates.

as name suggest technical replicates generally people do to check variation due to technical issues like library preparation or sequencing bias ness or sequencing error. In that case two library for same biological sample is been prepared and sequenced side by side in same sequencer.

Hope this helps Chirag

Answer 3

[realnewbie]

Technical and Biological Replicates clearly explained here. -Yes,induuude