title: Fluctuation analysis: the effect of plating efficiency.
abstract: This paper supplements an earlier paper which explained how to calculate the probability distribution of the number of mutants that would be observed in a fluctuation test experiment. The formulas in that work give the distributions to be expected under a wide variety of experimental conditions, but the method it uses when only a fraction of the mutants will produce visible colonies are clumsy and inefficient. Here I describe efficient procedures for dealing with that case, provided that the mutation rate per cell division remains constant during the experiment.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
authors.forename: F M
authors.initials: FM
authors.lastname: Stewart
mesh_terms: D015169:Colony Count, Microbial; D009154:Mutation; D011336:Probability