Similarly, the group of genes affected by the short-term experiment was different from both the long-term and medium term experiments, although there was some overlap in the three groups of genes affected.
Interestingly, the group of genes affected in the long-term experiment was different from the group affected by the medium-term experiment.
For example, female flies seem to be less sensitive to short-term exposure to strong magnetic fields than males (the medium-term experiment had the opposite trend, but this could be due to the fact that the medium-term experiment with females was carried out with insufficient replicates due to time constraints).
Only one array was hybridised for females from the medium-term experiment and for male flies from the 2 g* tubes in the long-term experiment, owing to reduced quality of these samples' replicates.
For the medium-term experiment, male spider crabs with a carapace width of 26 to 42 mm were divided into six groups and each group was randomly assigned to the different treatments.
Of particular interest are genes that appear in more than one experiment (for instance, those in italics that are also present in the medium-term experiment on females, orphan arrays) owing to their additional statistical significance.
If we compare male and female patterns in the 1 g* tube of the medium-term experiment (in Additional file 1, Figure S4), it is possible to localise a group of genes that are up-regulated by the magnetic field in males, but down-regulated in females, suggesting differential transcriptome adaption responses to stress in selected populations of the same species.
It is interesting that the same heat shock genes that appear in this list also appeared in the 2 g* vs 1 g* list, but in the latter they were over-expressed; the "Heat-shock-p70" gene was severely down-regulated in 1 g* compared to 1 g in males in a "medium-term" experiment, and up-regulated in 2 g* compared to 1 g* in females in a "short-term" experiment.
We have observed both embryonic development and pupal metamorphosis under diamagnetic levitation conditions (short- and medium-term experiments).
A medium-term tillage experiment was carried out (2005 2010) on a Vertisol to quantify changes in runoff, soil loss and crop yield due to Conservation agriculture (CA) in the sub-humid May Zegzeg catchment.
In the medium term, they will allow us to reduce the numbers of experiments that have to be performed, and speed-up the process of safety assessment.
