3.4.2 - PCR Amplification

The efficiency of PCR amplification is either specified by an universal success rate , or, by a normal distribution  parameterized to capture GC preferential biases (default mean_GC=0.5 and SD_GC=0.1). Given p, the number of copies produced from a certain fragment is determined by random sampling under the cumulative binomial:

with S denoting the PCR cycle and N the number of molecules. As default, we assume 15 PCR cycles (S=15), and sample randomly the number of duplicates yielded by PCR amplification under the corresponding probability distribution P₁₅(N) for all possible values of N=[1;2¹⁵]. The recursion terminates by