Indices of Synchrony in Cellular Cultures

An important biological technique is experimentation with cellular cultures, in which reproduction is more or less synchronous. Methods of inducing and maintaining synchrony are of particular interest. In this connection there arises the problem of quantifying synchrony and measuring its decay. Numerous indices have been proposed, mainly for heuristic reasons, but little is knowin about the values they can be expected to take. In this paper we compare values of some of these indices for a stochastic population model, and make proposals for their experimental use. The model is chosen to exhibit synchrony, and its decay due to stochastic fluctuations of individual lifelengths.