The effect of plasmid copy number

From 2006.igem.org

Simulation results for 4-pancake stacks indicate that the percent of plasmids that will be in the sorted configuration after k flips ranges between 0 and 0.1. If the cells have a low-copy number plasmid, we would need to distinguish between cell survival rates of 0.003 and 0.01, for example, to calibrate these two families with the simulation and determine flip rates. This would be nearly impossible. However, with a high-copy number plasmid, we only need to distinguish between 0.45 and 0.87 to distinguish these same two families.