Abstract
LURIA and DELBRUCK, in a seminal paper, introduced fluctuation analysis primarily as a means to elucidate the timing of mutation in relation to the imposition of selective conditions. Their work, and subsequently that of LEA and COULSON, established also a basis for measuring the frequency of mutational events. The several estimators proposed by these authors differ both in complexity and in efficiency, and the published literature relies mainly on the less efficient but computationally trivial estimators. The estimators as originally proposed assume that all mutants occurring in culture will be counted in the subsequent assay, but a relaxation of this assumption suggests an alternative experimental design and alternative estimators which offer advantages over those currently in common use.
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (848.5 KB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Cairns J., Overbaugh J., Miller S. The origin of mutants. Nature. 1988 Sep 8;335(6186):142–145. doi: 10.1038/335142a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Kendal W. S., Frost P. Pitfalls and practice of Luria-Delbrück fluctuation analysis: a review. Cancer Res. 1988 Mar 1;48(5):1060–1065. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Koch A. L. Genetic response of microbes to extreme challenges. J Theor Biol. 1993 Jan 7;160(1):1–21. doi: 10.1006/jtbi.1993.1001. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Li I. C., Chu E. H. Evaluation of methods for the estimation of mutation rates in cultured mammalian cell populations. Mutat Res. 1987 Apr;190(4):281–287. doi: 10.1016/0165-7992(87)90010-8. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- McCann J., Spingarn N. E., Kobori J., Ames B. N. Detection of carcinogens as mutagens: bacterial tester strains with R factor plasmids. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1975 Mar;72(3):979–983. doi: 10.1073/pnas.72.3.979. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Sarkar S., Ma W. T., Sandri G. H. On fluctuation analysis: a new, simple and efficient method for computing the expected number of mutants. Genetica. 1992;85(2):173–179. doi: 10.1007/BF00120324. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Stewart F. M., Gordon D. M., Levin B. R. Fluctuation analysis: the probability distribution of the number of mutants under different conditions. Genetics. 1990 Jan;124(1):175–185. doi: 10.1093/genetics/124.1.175. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]