Stochastic Description of Mutagenesis and Killing

A variety of chemically distinct lesions in DNA are likely to be involved in both killing and mutation. The average, or expected, number of biological 

If the relevant physical lesions are formed in direct proportion to dose, and if no dose-dependent processes are involved in the conversion of initial lesions to biological hits, then the hit function will be linear. More generally, H x) could be some more complex function that, nonetheless, can always be represented by an infinite power series in x with no constant term (since there can be no induced hits for zero dose). We denote the expected number of lethal and mutational hits at dose x by Hk x) and Hm(x), respectively. Thus, on the basis of single-event Poisson statistics, population homogeneity, and stochastic independence of mutation and killing, we can write 

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