ISSN:
1432-1416
Keywords:
Heterozygosity
;
Number of alleles
;
Mutation and selection
Source:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Topics:
Biology
,
Mathematics
Notes:
Summary One of the major goals of population genetics is to discover the nature and amount of genetic variation in natural populations. Various measures, including the population heterozygosity at any locus and the number of alleles extant at the locus, have been used for this purpose. An important task of theoretical population genetics is thus to provide expressions for the mean values of these two quantities (when calculated from a sample of genes) for various models of selection, mutation and random drift. This aim has been achieved for the selectively neutral case, where all alleles at the locus are assumed to be selectively equivalent. It is, however, generally agreed that classes of (evolutionarily unimportant) selectively deleterious alleles exist, so that the neutral theory calculations should be extended to cover this case. This has previously been done only for extremely weak selection. In this paper we obtain, via the confluent hypergeometric function and three allied functions, concise and simple exact and approximate formulae for the means of the above measures of population variation for arbitrary selective values. These all derive from the allelic “frequency spectrum”, which is of independent interest in assessing likely models of population variation.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00275839
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