week 02:

In class exercise

Use this jupyter notebook to calculate the probability for some specific values following a exponential distribution.

The Luria-Delbruck experiment

Here are my notes about the Luria-Delbruck experiment (1943) which definitively established that the mechanism by which bacteria become virus resistant is due to random mutations and not to any virus-induced immunity. Luria-Delbruck also tried to estimate the mutation rate from the number of mutants found in a colony derived from a single cell. They got their estimate off by at least one order of magnitud. These notes are based on MacKay’s exercise 35.4.