Mental Implosion

Let's skip past the unlucky thirteenth post, shall we?

Currently helping to plan for my final year project (tissue culture), and the sheer size of it is only now starting to get to me. The thing is we want to find the optimal conditions to grow a particular plant, and to do that we have to permutate each factor against each other. Say I have two factors, the concentration of sucrose added to the media and the media pH. Suppose for the sucrose I decide to test out 1%, 3%, 5% and 7% concentrations. Suppose also for the pH I want to test out pH 5, 6 and 7.

This means I'll have a plate with 1% sucrose and pH 5, another plate with 1% sucrose and pH 6, another with 1% sucrose and pH 7, and another with 3% sucrose and pH 5... well, you get the picture. For these two parameters alone, there are a total of 12 permutations.

Now consider that we are currently looking at six factors.

Some of them will have to be chucked out of course, and for others we'll have to do a slice test (so instead of checking the different pH values for every concentration of sucrose, we carry out a test only using sucrose, use that test to pick out a particular concentration causing an effect and then vary the pH against that one concentration). The matter is further complicated in that some of the factors involve components of the media, and after the media is poured it hardens - no more nutrients can be added to it. Basically, for some tests, we have to formulate and store the media separately, instead of making one uniform batch for the entire project.

The whole thing is horribly complicated, I'm getting headaches just thinking about it, and unless we simplify things soon, there is a good chance we'll just get meaningless results. I suppose one big problem is that few of us have any real idea what the objective of this project is. (Yes, that statement includes the project supervisors.) The result is that we're looking into everything, but especially in the culturing of living organisms, "everything" covers a large area.

I suspect I will need more chocolate hearts to make it through this project. (Oh, shut it. You have your poison, I have mine.) Significantly more than the three I had in quick succession today.