A typical survival bioassay consists in exposing a group of individuals to a certain concentration of a contaminant, and reporting the number of survivors at each time-point. This bioassay is generally replicated in order to assess the variability of the measured effect. In the end, there is thus one measurement for each triplet (replicate, dose, time).

Following this description, MOSAIC_survival expects the data from a bioassay formated as a tabular text file. Each line of the table corresponds to a time-point for a given replicate and a given contaminant concentration, and provides the corresponding number of surviving individuals. Hence it should contain the following four columns:

• replicate a number or a string unique for each replicate
• conc the dose of the contaminant
• time the time of the measurement
• Nsurv the number of survivors

Please note that the order of the column should be respected and that the first line of the file should contain the columns heading. Finally, the columns should be separated by a single tabulation character. Here is example of the first lines of a data file:

replicate	conc	time	Nsurv
A	0	0	20
B	0	0	20
C	0	0	20
A	1.25	7	18
B	1.25	7	19
C	1.25	7	17
A	5	7	19
B	5	7	18
C	5	7	15
A	10	7	2
B	10	7	2
C	10	7	3
[...]
    

Note that datasets following the format required by MOSAIC_repro can be used as-is in MOSAIC_survival. Example datasets compatible with both applications are available on our website (copper, chlordan, zinc, cadmium-1, cadmium-2).