Authors: Wolfgang P Angerer
Publish Date: 2009/08/26
Volume: 61, Issue: 1, Pages: 55-93
Abstract
We discuss the evaluation of LuriaDelbrück fluctuation experiments under BellmanHarris models of cell proliferation It is shown that under certain very natural assumptions concerning the lifetime distributions and the offspring distributions of mutant and nonmutant cells the suitably normed and centered number of mutants contained in a large culture of bacteria or the like converges to a certain stable random variable with index 1 The result obtains under the assumption that the mutation under consideration is “neutral” in the sense that on average and in the long run mutant cells produce the same number of offspring as nonmutant cells
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