A STATISTICAL METHOD TO COMPARE THE DEGREE OF MUSCLE CELL MULTIPLICATION IN DIFFERENT CULTURE DISHES

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Abstract
A method was developed for comparing 2 groups of numbers of cultured [chick embryo] muscle cells which were counted under a microscope. Important problems for this purpose were: how many fields per dish should be observed and how many dishes should be prepared under the same conditions, when given test criteria were set. Dishes were prepared under the same conditions. From each of the dishes, 20 fields were selected and the numbers of muscle cells [number of nuclei contained in myoblasts and myotubes] were counted and separately recorded. Since the purpose was to compare 2 groups of dishes, the design was a simple case of a nested one. The type of distribution seemed approximately a log-normal distribution with constancy of variance (homoscedasticity). Since the distribution of the cells in dishes belonging to the same group may be considered to be the same, the numbers from each dish may be pooled within a group. If the test criteria for Student''s t test and the sensitivity to descriminate the ratio of the number of groups are given, the number of fields to be observed per dish times that of dishes can be uniquely determined. This method can be applied for the same purpose to other kinds of cells with log-normal distribution.