Experimental design: Cells are grown, counted, and seeded in 96-well plates. Cells recover 24 hours. Cells are treated with different doses of a drug, 3x per treatment. Cell survival read via MTT.
This is repeated twice, on two additional times.
In other words, on three independent days, we seed out this plate and measure it one day afterwards (measurement kills the cells):
A | B | C | D | |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 µM | 2 µM | 5 µM | 10 µM |
2 | 1 µM | 2 µM | 5 µM | 10 µM |
3 | 1 µM | 2 µM | 5 µM | 10 µM |
Each Dosage (columns) is measured in triplicates (rows). This is repeated three times, so in the end, each dosage has a total of nine datapoints.
Does this experiment have 3 biological replicates, each of which has 3 technical replicates or is there another way to group this?
My inclination is to use a mixed-level model where each of the plates is a level in a random variable.