Our analysis suggests that, to become a sustainable microsatellite, a short tandem repeat needs to meet a minimal size requirement that allows it to acquire slippage rates higher than the overall genome slippage error rate and, according to our experimental results, to overcome the directionality bias that favors deletion errors.
The position of known deleted loci allowed us to estimate a minimal size for the deletion of 5.56 Mb.
Similar to the minimal word size as e.g. used in BLAST (Altschul et al., 1997), it is reasonable to consider a minimal size γ for EPMs.
However, metastatic disease is often detected too late by imaging technologies that require a tumor mass to achieve a minimal size before it can be detected.
The rightward skew in both distributions suggests that other kinetochore proteins prevent MNase from efficiently trimming the longer linkers between CENP-A nucleosomes to produce a minimal size of CENP-A nucleosomes.
To quantify this effect, in Appendix 4, we estimate maximal rates of environmental and phenotypic change when allowing modest population decline over a limited time frame (e.g., the population is to maintain a minimal size of 50 individuals for 50 generations).
The above function has a singularity at the equilibrium when M2 = F2 = 0. On the other hand, as stage 2 in our model is responsible for reproduction, it is natural to assume a minimal size must be maintained at this stage.
Tumors require neovasculature to grow above a minimal size, or else they outstrip their oxygen supply, and HIFs stimulate the production of VEGF and other crucial vascular growth factors [6], [37].
The models were run with the minimal size of 4 for a node to allow a split, a minimal size of 2 for all leaves, a minimal gain of 0.1 to produce a split, a maximal tree depth of 20, and a confidence level of 0.25 for the pessimistic error calculation of pruning and the number of alternative nodes of 3 when prepruning would prevent a split.
Even though we have found that FLSSM allows detection of high producers at the single cell level, it is more advantageous and reliable to pick positive colonies of a minimal size.
