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Murphy's law of limiting dilution cloning
Author(s) -
Staszewski Robert
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/sim.4780090416
Subject(s) - cloning (programming) , population , a priori and a posteriori , clone (java method) , matching (statistics) , mathematics , biology , statistics , genetics , computer science , sociology , dna , demography , philosophy , programming language , epistemology
Conventional practice and literature on limiting dilution cloning address the irrelevant problem of selection of a single progenitor from a uniform population, and provide optimistic estimates of monoclonality for interesting cultures and subcultures. Any cell line established via these estimates is suspect and may be polyclonally metastable. Cultures derived by limiting dilution of the progenitors of independently Poisson distributed populations obey a counterintuitive relation with the characteristics of a Murphy's law: the probability that an interesting culture is monotypic or monoclonal is less than that of a random non‐sterile culture, decreases for increasingly rare interesting cultures, and is bounded below by the probability of sterility. A priori and empiric a posteriori estimates of the probability that interesting subcultures are monotypic or monoclonal are derived consistent with this principle.