Fig. 5

Clone size distributions and total number of sampled clones. a Expected clone size distributions C ⁻¹〈m _q 〉 derived from the approximation in Additional file 1: Eq. A32 are plotted for various a and δ/(ε w) [where w≡(1+η)ω/μ _d]. The nearly coincident solid and dashed curves indicate that variations in a mainly scale the distribution by a multiplicative factor. In contrast, the combination δ/(ε w) controls the weighting at large clone sizes through the population cut-off imposed by the carrying capacity. Of the two controlling parameters, the steady-state clone size distribution is most sensitive to R≅δ/(ε w). The dependence of data-fitting on these two parameters is derived in Additional file 1 and discussed in the next section. b For ε w=5×10⁻⁵, the expected fraction C _s/C of active clones sampled as a function of lnδ and α. The expected number of clones sampled increases with carrying capacity K, HSC differentiation rate a=α/r, and the combined sampling and terminal differentiation rate ε w