Estimating the mode of growth of individual microbial cells from cell volume distributions

Abstract

Two new methods are derived for inferring the mode of growth of individual microbial cells from measurements made of the volume distributions of populations. One is based on statistics of the observed distribution and has the particular advantage that it is very easy to use. The second, which requires gradient centrifugation, yields the mode of growth directly, rather than by comparison with theoretically derived distributions. Both methods have been found to be more sensitive than those previously suggested.