Essential 10

1. Study design The groups being compared, including control groups. If no control group has been used, the rationale should be stated. examples

For each experiment, provide brief details of study design including:

1a The groups being compared, including control groups. If no control group has been used, the rationale should be stated.
1b The experimental unit (e.g. a single animal, litter, or cage of animals).
Explanation
Examples

Example 1

“The DAV1 study is a one-way, two-period crossover trial with 16 piglets receiving amoxicillin and placebo at period 1 and only amoxicillin at period 2. Amoxicillin was administered orally with a single dose of 30 mg.kg-1. Plasma amoxicillin concentrations were collected at same sampling times at each period: 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 h..” [1]

Example 2

Example of a study plan created using the Experimental Design Assistant

“Example of a study plan created using the Experimental Design Assistant showing a simple comparative study for the effect of two drugs on the metastatic spread of two different cancer cell lines. Block randomisation has been used to create 3 groups containing an equal number of zebrafish embryos injected with either cell line, and each group will be treated with a different drug treatment (including vehicle control). Each measurement outcome will be analysed by 2-way ANOVA to determine the effect of drug treatment on growth, survival and invasion of each cancer cell line.” [2]

  1. Nguyen TT, Bazzoli C and Mentre F (2012). Design evaluation and optimisation in crossover pharmacokinetic studies analysed by nonlinear mixed effects models. Statistics in medicine. doi: 10.1002/sim.4390
  2. Hill D, Chen L, Snaar-Jagalska E and Chaudhry B (2018). Embryonic zebrafish xenograft assay of human cancer metastasis [version 2; referees: 2 approved]. F1000Research. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.16659.2