a Department of Anatomy and Histology, The School of Medicine, Flinders University, Bedford Park, South Australia 5042;, Australia
b The School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, Bedford Park, South Australia 5042, Australia
Abstract:
Estimating the mutation rate from a Luria-Delbrück fluctuation experiment involves estimating the Poisson parameter in a compound Poisson distribution. The efficiency with which this can be estimated depends on how well the other random factors have been characterized. The assumption that cell growth can be represented as a stochastic pure birth or Yule process is biologically unrealistic but contributes little to the bias and variance of a maximum likelihood estimator of the mutation rate.