Question: A comparison of different types of scaffold material. One way to repair serious wounds is to insert some material as a scaffold for the body's repair cells to use as a template for new tissue. Scaffolds made from extracellular material (ECM) are particularly promising for this purpose. Because they are made from biological material, they serve as an effective scaffold and are then resorbed. Unlike biological material that includes cells, however, they do not trigger tissue rejection reactions in the body. One study compared six types of scaffold material.18 Three of these were ECMs and the other three were made of inert materials (MAT). There were three mice used per scaffold type. The response measure was the percent of glucose phosphated isomerase (Gpi) cells in the region of the wound. A large value is good, indicating that there are many bone marrow cells sent by the body to repair the tissue.
(a) Make a table giving the sample size, mean, and standard deviation for each of the six types of material. Is it reasonable to pool the variances? Note that the sample sizes are small and the data are rounded.
(b) Run the analysis of variance. Report the F statistic with its degrees of freedom and P-value. What do you conclude?