Comparative Analysis of Data Distribution Patterns in Plant Comet Assay

Screening capabilities of the comet assay have a real potential to study the impact of radiation and different mutagenic sources on induction of damage in DNA in plant nuclei. Heterogeneity of DNA damage data obtained by the application of different agents leads to an inconsistency and variation of the experimental outcomes, obtained after assessment of the comet populations. Although the potential of the comet assay technology has been clearly demonstrated, many important and interesting statistical questions remain. In this respect, different types of data need different statistical designs and this usually makes statistical analysis problematic. We advocate here a greater attention to different classical statistical distributions which best fit to plant comet data. We also demonstrate that all distribution patterns of the % of DNA in tail can be fitted by a Johnson SB distribution.