title: Sample size determination for the fluctuation experiment.
abstract: The Luria-Delbrück fluctuation experiment protocol is increasingly employed to determine microbial mutation rates in the laboratory. An important question raised at the planning stage is "How many cultures are needed?" For over 70 years sample sizes have been determined either by intuition or by following published examples where sample sizes were chosen intuitively. This paper proposes a practical method for determining the sample size. The proposed method relies on existing algorithms for computing the expected Fisher information under two commonly used mutant distributions. The role of partial plating in reducing sample size is discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Texas A&M School of Public Health, College Station, TX 77843, United States. Electronic address: qzheng@sph.tamhsc.edu.
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zheng
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics* / Q000254:growth & development; D003198:Computer Simulation; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008957:Models, Genetic; D009154:Mutation / Q000235:genetics*; D012107:Research Design / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D018401:Sample Size; D016008:Statistical Distributions
keywords: Expected Fisher information; Mandelbrot–Koch distribution; Plating efficiency; Thinned Lea–Coulson distribution