Figure 1:

Flow chart of the present study. (A) Biological experiments. The colony formation assay was conducted on the plate, then the number of resulting surviving colonies with 50 cells or more (open circles) and abortive colonies with less than 50 cells (closed circles) as well as the number of cells in each colony were counted. (B) The analysis was performed with a branching process model. Examples of cell lineage and the probability profile of reproductive cell death (RCD) estimated using Equation (1) are presented. (C) Monte Carlo simulation of abortive colony formation to evaluate the validity of the estimated RCD probability. Representative images of the in silico clonogenic colony and the simulated abortive colony size distribution are shown.