On an extension of Gani's model for attachment of phages to bacteria

Abstract

SummaryIn recent papers Yassky (1962) and Gani (1965) have considered respectively deterministic and stochastic models for the attachment of phages to bacteria. Following Brenner's (1965) conjecture they assumed that there is a maximum, S (say), to the number of phages that can be attached to a bacterium. In this note, Gani's (1965) results will be obtained starting from a different set of assumptions. This modification enables us to consider the case when S is a random variable, which probably is a more realistic assumption. Some remarks on the problem of estimation for the latter model are given in Section 3.