Talk:Luria–Delbrück experiment

To do

 * add a brief description of the attempt to extend and evaluate this finding. Various follow-up studies with other systems are reviewed by Sarkar 1991 (Sarkar S. 1991. Lamarck Contre Darwin, Reduction Versus Statistics: Conceptual Issues in the Controversy Over Directed Mutagenesis in Bacteria. In: Tauber AI, editor. Organism and the Origins of Self. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. p. 235-271.) Dabs (talk) 18:01, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
 * explain that the experiment only shows that some mutations arise prior to selection, and that this became a point of criticism in the directed mutations controversy. See also Sarkar 1991.  More recently CRISPR spacer acquisition has been invoked as an exception to spontaneousness in the Luria-Delbrück sense. Dabs (talk) 18:01, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

comments
There was some silliness about there not being any evidence yet for adaptive mutagenesis - adding a more recent and review on the matter by Foster. 173.53.60.192 (talk) 22:08, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Removed replica plating. This is not described in Luria Delbruck.
 * JimHu 00:26, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I have removed this nonsense about the "sophisticated mathematical" model for the plate counts. I first discovered this kind of verbage in my genetics textbook, and was surprised that the authors seemed to casually dismiss Delbruck's analysis as somehow to complicated or not important enough for students to understand. It is in fact the simplicity of their model and the experiment, I think, that was largely responsible for them earning the Nobel prize. People should take the time to understand it. When I have free day, I will set up an article describing the derivation of the Luria-Delbruck distribution.