FITTING LIMITING DILUTION EXPERIMENTS WITH GENERALIZED LINEAR-MODELS RESULTS IN A TEST OF THE SINGLE-HIT POISSON ASSUMPTION

Limiting dilution analysis is a common technique that is used in immun ology to estimate accurately the frequency of cells possessing a wide variety of functional activities such as growth, cytotoxicity and prod uction of lymphokines. The reliability of the estimated frequency is u sually checked by a standard chi-square (chi(2)) test validating the g oodness-of-fit to the single-hit Poisson model (SHPM). We present evid ence that modelling limiting dilution data according to a generalized linear model offers an alternative to the standard chi(2) test for det ecting departures from the SHPM, with a considerable increase in power compared to the chi(2) test.