Planning the suicide experiments

Suicide experiments involve a great degree of uncertainty in the counting of cell colonies. This work studies from a statistical point of view the precision of the estimation as a function of the number of experimental units which are used. Assuming that the colony numbers in recipients follow a Poisson distribution, we give the necessary number of recipients (a) to determine with a given accuracy the percentage of DNA synthesizing cells (S cells), (b) to test whether or not a cell population is quiescent, and (c) to compare the percentages of S cells in two cell populations.