Have you ever wanted to scream or just pull out your hair because you couldn't get an
experiment to work? I'm going to share a bit of unpublished data from my PhD. And
the reason it wasn't published is because it didn't work. For context, I was at the
very tail end of graduate school, and I'm just trying to get out the door. I
discovered some really interesting circuitry in brain slices for
bi-directionally controlling dopamine neurons. But to get that elusive nature
paper, I needed to figure out what the role of the circuitry was in behavior. So I ran
an experiment in mice. It's the technique called in vivo optogenetics. And it
didn't work. The data analysis alone took me several hours, and then I spent three
days just trying to figure out what went wrong. I was also writing my
dissertation, so I never went back and redid the experiment. Here, I'm going to
use Potato to automatically analyze that data and troubleshoot the experiment. So
I'll upload the raw data in a research paper looking at the same circuitry.
First, you can see that Tater, our AI co-scientist, uses a data analysis agent
to write code. It's going to first check that data and preprocess it. It'll do some
statistical analyses and graph the results. And I can use this code in my own
Jupyter notebook to replicate the findings or tweak the figures. As you can
see, there doesn't appear to be a difference between the control and the
treatment mice. But Potato also graphs the data across experimental sessions.
Again, not really in effect. It even did some analyses I never even thought of
doing. Now the data analysis agent is going to hand its findings back to Tater,
which gives me a report of the findings. Here it gives me the bad news. The result's
not statistically significant. It also points out some trends. Interestingly,
it suggests that there is a consistent effect with one animal. I actually
remember that mouse. Now it's going to go and do a critical review of the paper I gave
it in light of my hypothesis. Tater is going to compare the findings from my raw
data and its analysis to the results in the paper. Then it points out the reason my
experiment didn't work. The Yang paper did extensive validation of targeting,
so I may have injected the virus into the wrong location. The final report TATER
produces is structured similar to a scientific paper. It goes into more
detail and gives me specific suggestions on how to rerun the experiment. We've
deployed TATER to a number of labs. If you want to use it to do analysis and
troubleshooting, instead of repeatedly banging your head on the lab bench, reach
out to us.