rSalvador: An R package for the fluctuation experiment

Abstract

The past few years have seen a surge of novel applications of the Luria-Delbrück fluctuation assay protocol in bacterial research. Appropriate analysis of fluctuation assay data often requires computational methods that are unavailable in the popular web tool FALCOR. This paper introduces an R package named rSalvador to bring improvements to the field. The paper focuses on rSalvador's capabilities to alleviate three kinds of problems found in recent investigations: (i) resorting to partial plating without properly accounting for the effects of partial plating; (ii) conducting attendant fitness assays without incorporating mutants' relative fitness in subsequent data analysis; and (iii) comparing mutation rates using methods that are in general inapplicable to fluctuation assay data. In addition, the paper touches on rSalvador's capabilities to estimate sample size and the difficulties related to parameter nonidentifiability.