Statistical Package for Growth Rates Made Easy

Growth rates are an important tool in microbiology because they provide high throughput fitness measurements. The release of GrowthRates, a program that uses the output of plate reader files to automatically calculate growth rates, has facilitated experimental procedures in many areas. However, many sources of variation within replicate growth rate data exist and can decrease data reliability. We have developed a new statistical package, CompareGrowthRates (CGR), to enhance the program GrowthRates and accurately measure variation in growth rate data sets. We define a metric, Variability-score (V-score), that can help determine if variation within a data set might result in false interpretations. CGR also uses the bootstrap method to determine the fraction of bootstrap replicates in which a strain will grow the fastest. We illustrate the usage of CGR with growth rate data sets similar to those in Mira, Meza, et al. (Adaptive landscapes of resistance genes change as antibiotic concentrations change. Mol Biol Evol. 32(10): 2707-2715). These statistical methods are compatible with the analytic methods described in Growth Rates Made Easy and can be used with any set of growth rate output from GrowthRates.