Publication Description
This paper gives the probability that no common allozyme signature is found among n randomly selected cell culture lines when the s mutually exclusive and exhaustive signatures have arbitrary known probabilities. This result is useful in detecting cell culture contamination by a single cell line. This problem is a generalization of the classic problem of finding the probability of no common birthday among n individuals when it is assumed that each individual has a chance 1/s = 1/365 of a birthday on a given day. Both an exact recursive solution and an approximate solution are given for the general problem.