A population of ground mice consist of 500 individuals. You are interested in the gene that codes for for a color and find out t
here are 580 dominant alleles in this population. What is the allele frequency for the dominant allele? What is the allele frequency for the recessive allele? (show your work)
Mice are diploid (2n) organisms, which means that their cells contain two complete sets of homo-logous chromosomes (i.e., they have two copies of any given <em>locus</em>/gene). An allele can be defined as a variant of a gene, whereas diploid (2n) organisms have two alleles at each genetic <em>locus</em>, which are located on homo-logous chromosomes. In this case, we know that there are 580 dominant alleles in a population of 500 individuals, thereby the total number of alleles in this population is 1000 (2n >> 500 x 2 = 1000 alleles), and the frequency of the dominant allele is 0,58 (580/1000 = 0,58).
