FIGURE 9.

Average number of molecules in a colony as a function of the number of thermal cycles n, for both BD (large open circles) and MC (small solid circles) simulations. The uncertainty is smaller than the size of the circles. In the case of the MC simulations, after a very long transition time, the growth becomes geometric. The solid line has a slope of 2. The MC simulations used a duplication probability of p_t = 0.77 per cycle, a steric interaction strength parameter of N₀ = 7.1 (see Eq. 7), and the results were averaged over 1000 colonies.