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ISOGG. v. t. e. Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and population structure. [1]
Genetic characteristics have alternate forms, each inherited from one of two parents. Today these are called alleles. One allele is dominant over the other. The phenotype reflects the dominant allele. Gametes are created by random segregation. Heterozygotic individuals produce gametes with an equal frequency of the two alleles.
Mendel consciously chose pairs of genetic traits, represented by two alleles for his inheritance experiments. In nature, such genes often exist in several different forms and are therefore said to have multiple alleles. An individual usually has only two copies of each gene, but many different alleles are often found within a population.
Consider a population of monoecious diploids, where each organism produces male and female gametes at equal frequency, and has two alleles at each gene locus. We assume that the population is so large that it can be treated as infinite. Organisms reproduce by random union of gametes (the "gene pool" population model). A locus in this population ...
In genetics, dominance is the phenomenon of one variant (allele) of a gene on a chromosome masking or overriding the effect of a different variant of the same gene on the other copy of the chromosome. [1][2] The first variant is termed dominant and the second is called recessive. This state of having two different variants of the same gene on ...
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which is ...
These charts depict the different types of genetic selection. On each graph, the x-axis variable is the type of phenotypic trait and the y-axis variable is the amount of organisms. Group A is the original population and Group B is the population after selection. Graph 1 shows directional selection, in which a single extreme phenotype is favored.
If the DNA sequence at a particular locus varies between individuals, the different forms of this sequence are called alleles. DNA sequences can change through mutations, producing new alleles. If a mutation occurs within a gene, the new allele may affect the trait that the gene controls, altering the phenotype of the organism. [8]