The Luria-Delbruck fluctuation experiment protocol is increasingly employed to determine microbial mutation rates in the laboratory. An important question raised at the planning stage is "How many cultures are needed?" For over 70 years sample sizes have been determined either by intuition or by following published examples where sample sizes were chosen intuitively. This paper proposes a practical method for determining the sample size. The proposed method relies on existing algorithms for computing the expected Fisher information under two commonly used mutant distributions. The role of partial plating in reducing sample size is discussed.

中文翻译：

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确定波动实验的样本量。

Luria-Delbruck波动实验方案越来越多地用于确定实验室中的微生物突变率。在计划阶段提出的一个重要问题是“需要多少种文化？” 70多年来，通过直觉或遵循已公开的示例（直观地选择了样本大小）来确定样本大小。本文提出了一种确定样本量的实用方法。所提出的方法依赖于现有算法来计算两种常用突变分布下的期望Fisher信息。讨论了部分电镀在减小样品尺寸中的作用。