The relative numbers of different genes in exponential microbial cultures

It is shown that the results of the marker frequency analysis of Sueoka and Yoshikawa (1965) can be derived as very good approximations from a model where the rigid assumptions of their analysis are relaxed to take into account statistical variations in the timing of cell events. It is further shown that the expression for the amount of DNA per cell can be approximated by an elementary exponential function of the growth rate, and this result facilitates genetic mapping by DNA hybridization techniques. An analysis of recent data on gene frequencies in Escherichia coli corroborates a model of symmetric, bidirectional chromosome replication with a replication time of approximately thirty minutes.