We know that Hardy-Weinberg conditions include the following equations:
where
And where p = dominant, and q = recessive; this means that is equal to the homozygous dominant,
is the heterozygous, and
is the homozygous recessive .
So we have 100 total cats, with 4 having the recessive white coat color. That means we have a ratio of or 0.04. Let that equal our
value.
So when we solve for q, we get:
Now that we have our q value, we can use the other equation to find p:
So then we can solve for our heterozygous population:
This is the ratio of the population. So we then multiply this number by 100 to get the number of cats that are heterozygous:
So now we know that there are 32 heterozygous cats in the population.