Bacteria can evolve resistance to life-saving drugs they've never seen. Here's how.
In the 1940s, the famous Luria–Delbrück experiment showed that bacteria evolve resistance to drugs they'd never encountered thanks to a random mutational process.
Qi Zheng
Professor of Biostatistics, Texas A&M University
I began researching into the Luria–Delbrück distribution in 1998 at the suggestion of a renowned statistical distribution expert. The Luria–Delbrück distribution is a family of related distributions describing the probabilistic behavior of the numbers of mutants observed in a Luria–Delbrück experiment, which is also called the fluctuation experiment. The Luria–Delbrück distribution plays a key role in allowing microbiologists to extract information on microbial mutation rates from mutant count data generated by fluctuation experiments. I have devised an array of computational methods for the analysis of data generated by fluctuation experiments. I also made a computer package and a Web tool to help biologists analyze data from fluctuation experiments. My research results have appeared in mathematics, statistics and biology journals. My second research interest is in statistical education for public health students.
