Simple question that is hard to answer

[hzhen]

peter wrote:


> 
> Thanks Chen,
> I am not trying to clone anything. I am doing development work, in
> which I wonder if I have mixed population of different point mutant
> plasmids in same bacteria or one plasmid with different point
> mutations. Simple question - hard to answer without doing experiment.
> I thought someone might have the answer, but...
> 

I think similar kind of work has probably been done before (maybe 20-30 
years ago), you should just do a literature search for plasmid 
incompatibility.  My understanding is that the great majority of cells 
will have one or the other of the plasmids, a tiny percentage will have 
both.  It is all about statistics and probability.