BIOL 3500: Genetics NAME: ______Brian Capraro______

HOMEWORK #8
Fall 2020

1. You are a population geneticist studying a particular disease, which is inherited

as an autosomal recessive trait. In the population you are studying, the incidence of
the disease is 2%. You need to determine answers to the following questions:

 Calculate the frequency of the normal allele and the disease allele in this
population.
 What percentage of your population are carriers for this disease?
 What will be the incidence of this disease in the following generation?
 If this disease is fatal in childhood, what will be the frequency of the
normal and disease alleles in the parental generation (breeding adults)?
 If the disease is fatal in childhood, what will be the incidence of the
disease in the following generation?

- The frequency of the diseased allele is 0.14142, and the frequency of the
normal allele is 0.85858.
- The percentage of the population being a carrier is 24.28%, or 1 in 4.12.
- In a population of 1000 individuals tested, the frequency of the disease
alleles in the parental generation would be 0.124 (12.4%) and the normal
alleles would be 0.876 (87.6%).
- From the parental generation the incidence of the disease would be reduced
to 0.0154 (1.54%).

2. You are a geneticist studying the frequency of coat color alleles in a local rabbit
population. Rabbits that carry two dominant alleles of a particular gene (BB) are
brown, while 3.5% of the population are homozygous for the recessive allele (bb)
and are white. Heterozygotes (Bb) are mottled, a mixture of brown and white.
Assuming this population is in HWE, what percentage of rabbits do you expect to be
brown, and what percentage do you expect to be mottled?

The frequency of BB (brown) is 66.1%, Bb (mottled) is 30.4% and bb (white) is

3.5%

As it turns out, this population is not in HWE. You sample 1,000 rabbits and find the
following:

752 Brown rabbits

210 Mottled rabbits
38 White rabbits

After observing this population, you find that due to their white coloring, 90% of
white rabbits die from predation before they can reproduce. Additionally, 50% of
mottled rabbits die from predation before reproducing. Given this information,
what do you expect the frequencies of brown, mottled and white rabbits to be in the
next generation?

752 BB
(210 * 0.5 = 105) 210 – 105 = 105 Bb
(38 * .9 = 34.2) 38 - 34.2 = 3.8 bb (which I rounded to 4 bb) so, 4 bb

B = 1609/1722 = .9344
B = 113/1722 = .0656

p squared = .8731
2pq = .1226
q squared = .0043

Based on the newly found data the frequency of the rabbits in the following
generation are as followed:

Brown = 87.31%
Mottled = 12.26%
White = 0.43%