In: Biology
Sickle cell anemia is a recessive disorder caused by a mutation in the hemoglobin A gene. Persons with the disease have a variety of serious health issues related to fragile and sickling red blood cells including premature death, and infants sometimes die from complications. In regions of central Africa where malaria is endemic, the relative fitnesses for individuals that are homozygous for the wild type hemoglobin allele (HbA), heterozygous (HbAHbS), and homozygous for the sickle cell allele (HbS) are 0.8, 1.0 and 0.1 respectively. The selection coefficient for someone of Central African ancestry who is an HbA/HbA homozygote born and raised in Chicago would be ____
Selection co-efficient determines the relative selection strength against any genotype. It is simply determined by subtracting relative fitness value from one.
Mathematically, it can be presented as
Where s represents the genotype for any genotype "XX"
and W is the relative fitness of genotype "XX"
Here, the relative fitness of homozygote HbA/HbA genotype is
Substituting the given values in above equation, we get -
Selection co-efficient of determines that HbA/HbA homozygote will have % difficult time producing offspring than individuals having Selection co-efficient of (here in this case it would be heterozygous (HbAHbS) individuals)