The power of biological replicates in statistical analysis
It is not uncommon that we see biological replicates are used in case-controlled studies. The reason is straightforward: there is no biologically identical individual. Whenever we are to investigate the biological difference between individual with different phenotype, say cancerous vs non-cancerous, the biological variation within phenotype (not associated with phenotype of interest) is a confounder to our experiment. We therefore need to collect appropriate amount of sample