Maybe someone can take a second look at the paper. I couldn't find the published version, just a manuscript[1] (kudos to the authors for making it available under CC license). But... The only reference I could find about the sample size says:
> "To prepare a single RNA injection, the pleural-pedal and abdominal ganglia were removed from 4-5 sensitization-trained animals—or from 4-5 untrained controls—immediately after the 48-h posttest"
4-5??? I really hope that I'm missing something here, otherwise I find truly depressing how low the bar is for scientific journals.
Figure legend 1D says: “Control RNA (5.4 ± 3.9 s, n = 7) and Trained RNA (38.0 ± 4.6 s, n = 7)”
That’s a relatively low n but it might be sufficient. However, they don’t explain how the number was reduced from ~30 donor animals to 7 test animals. This might be entirely reasonable though (I know nothing about working with Aplysia).
I'm sorry, Sturgeon's Law is in full effect and the current system encourages spamming out low-tier research for grants/etc.. So the bar is on a completely different metric altogether from what a normal person would expect
> "To prepare a single RNA injection, the pleural-pedal and abdominal ganglia were removed from 4-5 sensitization-trained animals—or from 4-5 untrained controls—immediately after the 48-h posttest"
4-5??? I really hope that I'm missing something here, otherwise I find truly depressing how low the bar is for scientific journals.
[1] http://www.eneuro.org/content/eneuro/early/2018/05/14/ENEURO...