Introduction into R - Basics 2 (Bioinformatics S7E2)

[@noorpasha-w6o]

"Thank you, Professor. I have a question about the Poisson distribution. Could you please explain how the Poisson distribution is implemented in the context of EMS mutagenesis in Arabidopsis seeds? For example, if I treat Arabidopsis seeds with EMS, what is the probability of obtaining a desired mutant in the M2 plants?"

[@DannyArends]

My guess would be that the Poisson distribution is the one that models your response to EMS treatment on seeds. Since mutations are random across the genome, we would expect genes to be hit at random. However, since generally we do random mutagenic treatment, but look/are interested in a single phenotype for differences in the M2, we expect only a very small amount of mutations to be hitting genes that influence it. So if we do this many times (e.g. 100 rounds of mutagenic treatment,), we would see that often (e.g 85%) we have no single mutant which shows an mutant phenotype. sometimes (e.g. 10% of the treatments) we see 1 mutant, very seldom (e.g. 4.9% of the treatments) we see 2 mutants, and we almost never (< 0.1 %) observe >3 mutants. The distribution (of how many mutants do we expect in the M2) most likely follows a Poisson distribution as above. Hope this helps.

[@noorpasha-w6o]

@@DannyArends thank you prof