In: Biology
Does the following fitness array reflect heterozygote inferiority or superiority?
A1A1 A1A2 A2A2
fitness 0.70 1 0.80
Calculate the equilibrium frequency of p for the given fitnesses.
Is this a stable or unstable equilibrium?
Answer: Let the ralative fitness of A1A1, A1A2 and A2A2 be w11, w12 and w22 respectively. Here, the heterozygote, A1A2 has the highest fitness which equals to 1, and the two homozygotes, A1A1 and A2A2 have a lower fitness that are 0.7 and 0.8 respectively. So natural selction is favoring the heterozygote. This type of balancing selection is called heterosis, overdominance or heterozygote superiority. An equilibrium of allele frequencies arises when the heterozygote has higher fitness than either of the homozygotes. Thus, the above fitness values reflect heterozygote superiority.
Let the equilibrium frequency of A1 and A2 alleles be p and q respectively and the respective selection coefficient of A1A1 be s and that of A2A2 be t. Therefore, fitness of A1A1 genotype is and the fitness of A2A2 genotype is
Equilibrium frequency of p = and equilibrium frequency of q =. Now as , the equilibrium will be stable.