Equipment alignment sequence

Multiple-collection techniques. Uranium. Table 1 shows a typical protocol used by multi-collector instruments (equipped with one ion counting channel) both in MC-TIMS, MC-ICPMS and LA-MC-ICPMS (e.g., Cohen et al. 1992 Stirling et al. 1995 Luo et al. 1997 Stirling et al. 2000 Pietruszka et al. 2002). A first sequence monitors the atomic ratios between and by aligning Faraday collectors for masses (10 ... 

We cannot be sure of the answers provided by statistical methods. But if they are developed appropriately, they provide a significance estimate, such as the P-value that was the main claim to fame of the BLAST program and its real innovation. This value tells us how much we can believe an analysis or prediction, in the case of BLAST a local sequence match witnessed by an alignment. Recently several other bioinformatics analysis methods have been equipped with theoretically founded or heuristically fitted significance estimates (see Chapters 2 and 6 of Volume 1). Only few bioinformatics tools come with this kind of significance estimate today, and we need more of them. 

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