The phrase "attempting to detect a" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when describing an effort to identify or discover something, often in a scientific or technical context.
Example: "The researchers are attempting to detect a signal from the distant galaxy."
Alternatives: "trying to identify a" or "seeking to find a".
However, difficulties are often encountered when attempting to detect a leak in a plastic pipe, as the leak noise signals attenuate very rapidly away from the leak.
Rather than attempting to detect a pre-existing state, we open or re-open the matter and come to a resolution.
Recently, PCA has been applied to large-scale association studies using data for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in attempting to detect a few top axes of large genetic variation [10], [11].
An apt analogy for a genome biologist attempting to measure transcription of a short, low-abundance gene from genome-wide RNA-Seq data is the difficulty encountered by an astronomer attempting to detect a low magnitude star from images collected in a low resolution sky survey.
Second, our method is actually attempting to detect an expression of intent to protest - however many things can then prevent that protest from actually happening, e.g. strong police presence or threats of retaliation, or simply a resolution of the underlying issue.
It should be pointed out that there may be considerable benefits in attempting to detect an excess of compound heterozygotes rather than only homozygotes.
Using Cohen's rule of thumb [ 12], superiority trials typically attempt to detect a medium effect, while inferiority trials aim to rule out a small to medium effect.
To attempt to detect a putative remote homology between the OBP and CSP gene families, we performed a series of similarity searches using different approaches.
The second of these detectors attempts to detect a face by including a region around the face, containing head and shoulders (cross-markers).
Finally, when one attempts to detect a syndrome from a test, one determines the sensitivity and specificity values for this test.
In addition, attempts to detect a defect in DNA single- and/or double-strand break repair in aprataxin-defective cells have proved conflicting and unclear [8,20 22].
