Question

3. In one population, 18 individuals have long hair and 182 individuals have short hair. It is known thatmating has been random with respect to hair length for several generations. (a) What are the hair length allele frequencies in this population?

Answer 1

Answer: p (short hair) = 0.91 and q (long hair) = 0.09

Explanation: In the population, short hair is a feature of domnant allele, because there are more short haired individuals than with long hair. In genetics, p is the frequency for dominant allele and q is for recessive allele.

For this question, short hair is allele L and long hair is allele l

So, the frequency of short hair is p and of long hair is q.

To calculate the frequencies:

Frequency of allele L = (number of copies of allele L in population) / (total number of L/l gene copies in population)

p = 182/200 = 0.91

The same formula goes for the recessive allele, so:

q = 18/200 = 0.09

Thus, the frequencies of hair allele are 0.91 and 0.09 for short and long, respectively.