Signal in the noise: temporal variation in exponentially growing populations
Abstract
In exponential population growth, variability in the timing of individual division events and environmental factors (including stochastic inoculation) compound to produce variable growth trajectories. In several stochastic models of exponential growth we show power-law relationships that relate variability in the time required to reach a threshold population size to growth rate and inoculum size. Population-growth experiments in E. coli and S. aureus with inoculum sizes ranging between 1 and 100 are consistent with these relationships. We quantify how noise accumulates over time, finding that it encodes -- and can be used to deduce -- information about the early growth rate of a population.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2304.11474,
title = {Signal in the noise: temporal variation in exponentially growing populations},
author = {Eric W. Jones and Joshua Derrick and Roger M. Nisbet and Will Ludington and David A. Sivak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.11474},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
6 page main text with 5 figures, 8 page supplement with 4 figures. Updated with substantially revised manuscript