Department of Mathematics
University of Missouri
Columbia MO 65211, USA
email: stephen@missouri.edu
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
New York, NY 10012, USA
email: hoveys@cims.nyu.edu
Stephen J. Montgomery-Smith, Hesam Oveys
Abstract:
Microbial populations adapt to their environment by acquiring advantageous mutations,
but in the early twentieth century, questions about how these organisms acquire mutations
arose. The experiment of Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück that won them a Nobel Prize
in 1969 confirmed that mutations don't occur out of necessity, but instead can occur many
generations before there is a selective advantage, and thus organisms follow Darwinian
evolution instead of Lamarckian. Since then, new areas of research involving microbial
evolution have spawned as a result of their experiment. Determining the mutation rate
of a cell is one such area. Probability distributions that determine the number of mutants
in a large population have been derived by Lea, Coulson, and Haldane.
However, not much work has been done when time of cell division is dependent on the cell age,
and even less so when cell division is asymmetric, which is the case in most microbial
populations. Using probability generating function methods, we rigorously construct a
probability distribution for the cell population size given a life-span distribution for
both mother and daughter cells, and then determine its asymptotic growth rate.
We use this to construct a probability distribution for the number of mutants in a large
cell population, which can be used with likelihood methods to estimate the cell mutation rate.
Submitted May 26, 2021. Published June 23, 2021.
Math Subject Classifications: 92D15.
Key Words: Probability generating function; fluctuation analysis;
asymmetric cell division; Laplace transform.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.58997/ejde.2021.56
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Stephen J. Montgomery-Smith Department of Mathematics University of Missouri Columbia MO 65211, USA email: stephen@missouri.edu |
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Hesam Oveys Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences New York University New York, NY 10012, USA email: hoveys@cims.nyu.edu |
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