Explicit tracking of uncertainty increases the power of quantitative rule-of-thumb reasoning in cell biology.

Abstract:

:Back-of-the-envelope or rule-of-thumb calculations involving rough estimates of quantities play a central scientific role in developing intuition about the structure and behavior of physical systems, for example in so-called Fermi problems in the physical sciences. Such calculations can be used to powerfully and quantitatively reason about biological systems, particularly at the interface between physics and biology. However, substantial uncertainties are often associated with values in cell biology, and performing calculations without taking this uncertainty into account may limit the extent to which results can be interpreted for a given problem. We present a means to facilitate such calculations where uncertainties are explicitly tracked through the line of reasoning, and introduce a probabilistic calculator called CALADIS, a free web tool, designed to perform this tracking. This approach allows users to perform more statistically robust calculations in cell biology despite having uncertain values, and to identify which quantities need to be measured more precisely to make confident statements, facilitating efficient experimental design. We illustrate the use of our tool for tracking uncertainty in several example biological calculations, showing that the results yield powerful and interpretable statistics on the quantities of interest. We also demonstrate that the outcomes of calculations may differ from point estimates when uncertainty is accurately tracked. An integral link between CALADIS and the BioNumbers repository of biological quantities further facilitates the straightforward location, selection, and use of a wealth of experimental data in cell biological calculations.

journal_name

Biophys J

journal_title

Biophysical journal

authors

Johnston IG,Rickett BC,Jones NS

doi

10.1016/j.bpj.2014.08.040

subject

Has Abstract

pub_date

2014-12-02 00:00:00

pages

2612-7

issue

11

eissn

0006-3495

issn

1542-0086

pii

S0006-3495(14)01124-2

journal_volume

107

pub_type

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