Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:24:50.162Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

An Age-Dependent Branching Process with Correlations Among Sister Cells

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Kenny S. Crump
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo

Extract

In this note we consider an age-dependent branching process in which the life-spans of sister cells are correlated as well as the numbers of offspring of sister cells, but otherwise cells live and reproduce independently. One might surmise that in many populations there would be some positive correlation among siblings due to similar characteristics inherited from parents. Data of Powell (1955) seem to corroborate this conjecture. Powell's data indicate that in certain bacterial populations the life-spans of sister cells have significant positive correlations while the correlation between the life-spans of mother and daughter cells is negligible. More recently positive correlations have been observed in cell populations among the life-spans of first cousins and also among second cousins (Kubitschek (1967)). However, the model presented in this note permits correlations only among siblings.

Type
Short Communications
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bellman, R. and Harris, T. (1952) On age-dependent binary branching processes. Ann. Math. 55, 280295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chernoff, H. and Teicher, H. (1958) A central limit theorem for sums of interchangeable random variables. Ann. Math. Statist. 29, 118130.Google Scholar
Harris, T. (1963) The Theory of Branching Processes. Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Google Scholar
Kubitschek, H. E. (1967) Cell generation times: ancestral and internal controls. Proc. Fifth Berkeley Symp. Math. Statist. and Prob. 4, 549572.Google Scholar
Powell, E. (1955) Some features of the generation times of individual bacteria. Biometrika 42, 1644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar