Models for a Bacterial Growth Process with Removals

Abstract

The paper considers the extinction of a bacterial colony subject to phage infection. A description of the biological process leads to the construction of a simplified model from which it is possible to derive the probability generating function (p.g.f.) for surviving bacteria in terms of repeated contour integrals. The distributions of phage offspring released by a single bacterium, and of bacterial infections due to these phages, are discussed. For bacterial birth and birth-death processes, it is possible to express the p.g.f. for surviving bacteria explicitly; this is done by first obtaining the p.g.f. conditional on numbers of bacterial infections, and then summing over all such possible infections.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1963
Source ID
10.1111/j.2517-6161.1963.tb00494.x

Entities

People

  • J. Gani

Organizations

  • Australian National University
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Biology
  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Microbial Pathology