Jones M E
School of Medicine, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Mutat Res. 1993 Oct;292(2):191-8. doi: 10.1016/0165-1161(93)90147-r.
In estimating the spontaneous mutation rate, mu, in cultured mammalian cells, the number of mutant cells in several parallel cultures, each a clone from a single cell, is determined. Luria and Delbrück (1943), and subsequently Lea and Coulson (1949), proposed several estimators of mu using data from such experiments. These methods of analysis were originally proposed to apply to mutants arising in microbial cultures, and some of the limitations in applying them to mammalian cell cultures have been outlined by Featherstone et al. (1987), and by Kendal and Frost (1988). For a given value of mu, the number of mutants, r, found in a culture is exceedingly variable, so that r contains very little information concerning mu. It is important, therefore, that an estimator of mu be efficient; that it not waste the limited information available in the experimental data. To this end, a new estimator is proposed which compounds the information previously utilized by the so-called P0 and median estimators. Using a spreadsheet program such as that available with MINITAB, the algorithm can be programmed in as few as 26 instructions. Tested against simulated data across a range of values of mu, the proposed compound estimator is more efficient than the currently used estimators.
在估算培养的哺乳动物细胞中的自发突变率μ时，要确定几个平行培养物中的突变细胞数量，每个培养物都是来自单个细胞的克隆。卢里亚和德尔布吕克（1943年），以及随后的利和库尔森（1949年），利用此类实验的数据提出了几种估算μ的方法。这些分析方法最初是为应用于微生物培养中出现的突变体而提出的，费瑟斯通等人（1987年）以及肯德尔和弗罗斯特（1988年）已经概述了将它们应用于哺乳动物细胞培养的一些局限性。对于给定的μ值，在一个培养物中发现的突变体数量r变化极大，因此r关于μ的信息很少。所以，重要的是μ的估算器要有效；它不能浪费实验数据中可用的有限信息。为此，提出了一种新的估算器，它整合了先前所谓的P0估算器和中位数估算器所利用的信息。使用诸如MINITAB附带的电子表格程序，该算法可以用少至26条指令进行编程。在一系列μ值的模拟数据上进行测试，所提出的复合估算器比目前使用的估算器更有效。
