Jones M E
School of Medicine, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide.
J Theor Biol. 1994 Feb 7;166(3):355-63. doi: 10.1006/jtbi.1994.1032.
Cells growing in culture are subject to mutation, and as mutation is a random event, the number of mutants in a culture will be a random variable. The size of the clone of mutants arising from a single mutational event depends on the timing of the mutation; the earlier the mutation the larger the corresponding clone of mutants. The frequency with which new mutations arise may be estimated from examining the number of mutants found in a number of parallel cultures, each culture arising from a single cell. An efficient estimator of mutation rate in such an experiment is a maximum likelihood estimator. The use of such an estimator presupposes knowledge of the probability distribution for the number of mutants to be detected in a culture, given the mutation rate. In turn this depends on the probability distribution for the size of the clone of detected mutants arising from any single mutation. This latter distribution depends on the relative cell cycle time, tau, of the mutants, and on the probability, s, that a mutant which exists will be detected. This paper develops the required probability distribution.
在培养中生长的细胞会发生突变，由于突变是一个随机事件，培养物中突变体的数量将是一个随机变量。由单个突变事件产生的突变体克隆的大小取决于突变发生的时间；突变发生得越早，相应的突变体克隆就越大。新突变出现的频率可以通过检查在许多平行培养物中发现的突变体数量来估计，每个培养物都来自单个细胞。在这样的实验中，突变率的有效估计器是最大似然估计器。使用这样的估计器预先假定已知给定突变率时培养物中要检测到的突变体数量的概率分布。反过来，这又取决于由任何单个突变产生的检测到的突变体克隆大小的概率分布。后一种分布取决于突变体的相对细胞周期时间tau，以及存在的突变体被检测到的概率s。本文推导了所需的概率分布。
