Big paper out today: units matter in biology!

This is a big one: our paper out today, "Quantification of bacterial fluorescence using independent calibrants," is the official peer-reviewed presentation of the results from the 2016 iGEM interlaboratory study.  After spending a year or so digesting all of the data for publication, the bottom line is this: everybody can and should calibrate their fluorescence measurements.

Here's the key figures of the paper, showing just how much error reduced when using an independent calibrant to put units on your measurements. And notice those orange bars in the middle: that's how well you can do with relative units based on a control strain of cells. It's better than nothing, but still far worse than with an actual independent calibrant, because there are so many ways your control strain can get messed up in the same way that your experimental strains are getting messed up.

It's cheap. It's easy. High school students and undergraduates can do it.  And so should every other biological researcher or engineer measuring cellular fluorescence, especially those working in synthetic biology.