Day 15: Hardy-Weinberg Problems

Hardy and Weinberg came up with an idea for genetic equilibrium. In order for there to be an equilibrium in an ecosystem then there must be five present conditions.
These conditions are:

• The population must be large
• Their mating must be random
• No natural selection
• No mutations
• No immigration or emigration

After learning these things. We walked around class with a set of 2 dominant alleles and 2 recessive alleles cards. When a song stopped we had to randomly "mate" (exchange cards) with the person next to us. Then we recorded if we had homozygotes genotypes and heterozygotes for recessive or dominant or both. After recording this we proceeded to calculate the percentages of the dominant alleles and the recessive ones. After finding this out we could solve for things we didn't know using these formulas.

p + q  = 1

p^2 + 2pq + q^2 = 1

The p represents the dominant allele like an A and the q represents the recessive allele an a. Therefore the 2pq is 2 times the heterogenous genotype.

This is important because we can determine the genotypes in a population if we know some minor information about the alleles.