In the

biological sciences Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary ...

, a replicate is an exact copy of a sample that is being analyzed, such as a cell, organism or molecule, on which exactly the same procedure is done. This is often done in order to check for

experimental An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

or procedural error. In the absence of error replicates should yield the same result. However, replicates are not independent tests of the hypothesis because they are still the same sample, and so do not test for variation between samples. Replicates are often created to test the quality and repeatability of a procedure, or for a destructive procedure where preserving the original sample is desirable. They are also sometimes inappropriately used to inflate the apparent number of observations in a sample, creating an illusion of

statistical significance In statistical hypothesis testing, a result has statistical significance when it is very unlikely to have occurred given the null hypothesis (simply by chance alone). More precisely, a study's defined significance level, denoted by \alpha, is the p ...

References

Biological processes Measurement Scientific method Tests Validity (statistics) {{Biology-stub

See also

References