Inter-animal variation and its influence on the overall precision of morphometric estimates based on nested sampling designs

Abstract

This paper provides additional experimental evidence that biological variation between individuals is likely to be the major factor influencing the overall precision and efficiency of nested sampling schemes for morphometric analysis of thin sections. Four distinct experimental systems (two based on nervous tissue and two on epithelia) have been investigated. Morphometric estimates were obtained from measurements made on micrographs generated by sampling tissues at several levels. Sources of sampling variation were isolated so that the contributions to overall variance made by inter-animal differences could be evaluated. In each case, biological variation was the cardinal component of total observed variance between animals. Relative contributions ranged from 53% to 78%. Examining more animals would be the most efficient way of reducing the variance of the group mean in these sampling designs.