Stewart F M
Mathematics Department, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912.
Genetics. 1994 Aug;137(4):1139-46. doi: 10.1093/genetics/137.4.1139.
Fifty one years ago, Luria and Delbrück published in Genetics a paper that was to become a classic. In it they proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that bacteria were mutating to phage resistance long before they could have encountered any bacteriophage. Luria and Delbrück also showed how the same experimental data could be used to estimate bacterial mutation rates. Since that time and in many different contexts the methods that they introduced have been used to estimate mutation rates. However, little seems to be known about the errors to be expected in such estimates. In what follows I examine how much uncertainty in the estimates is to be expected merely on the basis of the stochastic variability inherent in the sampling process. On the basis of this examination I question a few traditional ideas and conclude with some practical suggestions. The results were obtained by stimulation. It is my hope that they may inspire others to provide a rigorous theoretical basis for such calculations.
五十一年前，卢里亚和德尔布吕克在《遗传学》杂志上发表了一篇后来成为经典的论文。在论文中，他们确凿无疑地证明，早在细菌接触到任何噬菌体之前，它们就已经在向噬菌体抗性发生突变了。卢里亚和德尔布吕克还展示了如何利用相同的实验数据来估计细菌的突变率。从那时起，在许多不同的情况下，他们引入的方法一直被用于估计突变率。然而，对于此类估计中可能出现的误差，似乎了解甚少。在接下来的内容中，我将研究仅基于抽样过程中固有的随机变异性，估计中会预期出现多大的不确定性。基于此项研究，我对一些传统观念提出质疑，并给出一些实际建议。这些结果是通过模拟获得的。我希望它们可能会激发其他人为此类计算提供严格的理论基础。
