Detection of cellular aging in a Galton-Watson process

We consider the bifurcating Markov chain model introduced by Guyon to detect cellular aging from cell lineage. To take into account the possibility for a cell to die, we use an underlying super-critical binary Galton Watson process to describe the evolution of the cell lineage. We give in this more general framework a weak law of large number, an invariance principle and thus fluctuation results for the average over all individuals in a given generation, or up to a given generation. We also prove that the fluctuations over each generation are independent. Then we present the natural modifications of the tests given by Guyon in cellular aging detection within the particular case of the auto-regressive model. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.