Use of compound-probability distributions in the study of induced post-implantation dominant lethals

The nature of the probability distribution of post-implantation dominant lethality was investigated in terms of the distribution of dead implants per female. It has been postulated that this distribution would be poisson in a control series of females but may follow a compound or a contagious distribution such as the beta binomial, negative binomial or Neyman type A in the treated series of females. The nature of these compound distributions for fitting mammalian mutagenicity has been examined. The implications of the results on the estimation of induced mutation rates are discussed.