Author(s)

Juan x Juan Aguirre, Carmen Bravo, Juan A. Ordóñez, Gonzalo García de Fernando

Departamento de Nutrición, Bromatología y Tecnología de los Alimentos, Facultad de Veterinaria, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain.
Servicio Informático de Apoyo a Docencia e Investigación, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain.

Many articles dealing with individual cell lag phase determination assume that growth, when observed, comes from one cell. This assumption is not in agreement with the Poisson distribution, which uses the probability of growth in a sample to predict how many samples contain one, two, or some other number of cells. This article analyses and compares different approaches to improve the accuracy of lag phase estimation of individual cells and micropopulations. It argues that if the highest initial load, as predicted by the Poisson distribution, is assigned to the sample with the shortest lag phase, the second highest to the sample with the second shortest lag phase and so on, the resulting lag phase distributions would be more accurate. This study also proposes the use of a robust test, permutation test, to compare lag phase distributions obtained in different situations.

Individual Cells; Micropopulations; Lag Phase; Poisson Distribution

J. Juan Aguirre, C. Bravo, J. A. Ordóñez and G. García de Fernando, "The Poisson Distribution Is Applied to Improve the Estimation of Individual Cell and Micropopulation Lag Phases," Advances in Microbiology, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2012, pp. 146-161. doi: 10.4236/aim.2012.22020.