[Fish and chips]

The cultivation of environmental microorganisms has long been hindered by the inability to replicate complex native conditions in vitro. The isolation chip (iChip) addresses this limitation by facilitating the growth of previously uncultivable microorganisms through in situ incubation. Designed for high-throughput microbial cultivation, the iChip comprises hundreds of microchambers, each capable of housing a single microbial cell. These microchambers are loaded with a mixture of molten agar and...

Fluorescence in situ hybridization, or FISH, was developed in the early 1980s and has quickly become one of the most widely used techniques in cytogenetics. Labeled probes are used to bind complementary DNA or RNA sequences on a chromosome or in a region within a cell. Earlier, the probes could only be obtained by cloning or reverse transcription of a DNA template. Currently, the probe oligonucleotides can be synthesized synthetically. Additionally, with the advancement of optical techniques,...

Fisher's exact test is a statistical significance test widely used to analyze 2x2 contingency tables, particularly in situations where sample sizes are small. Unlike the chi-squared test, which approximates P-values and assumes minimum expected frequencies of at least five in each cell, Fisher's exact test calculates the exact probability (P-value) of observing the data or more extreme results under the null hypothesis. This feature makes it especially valuable when the assumptions of the...