Identifiability of DNA distribution from flow cytometric data with cell debris

In flow cytometric measurement of cell DNA distribution one of the major problems is accounting for the effect of fragmentation in the staining process. This work considers a recent probabilistic model that has been proposed for the fragmentation process and species under which conditions it is possible to uniquely identify the DNA distributions of the original population using flow cytometric data. Attention is given both to the normal and to the polyploid case. This work was partially supported by a grant of the Italian National Research Council, Special Project “Oncology”, contract number 84.00632.44.