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Drosophila Lab Abstract

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Introduction The study of population genetics is simply how the genes or alleles within a population may vary or change. The purpose of population genetics is being able to predict the genes that are expressed in future generations and understanding why that is. An allele is an alternate form of a gene, so blonde hair and black hair are both alleles but hair color is a gene. In this particular experiment the alleles being focused on are the body colors of the Drosophila melanogaster, which is the common fruit fly. The two different body color alleles are the wild type, tan body color, and the ebony type, black body color. Drosophila melanogaster was chosen for the experiment as it is the archetype for population genetics. Drosophila is a model organism for population genetics just as the house mouse has become a model organism (Powell, 1997). The benefits of using Drosophila in this experiment is that it has a short life cycle along with a fast …show more content…

To test to see if evolution is taking place the Hardy-Weinberg Principle will be used. This equation allows us to predict future allele frequencies based on the current alleles frequencies if no evolution were taking place. This means if the observed frequencies differ from the expected frequencies some form of evolution must have taken place. The Hardy-Weinberg Principle has many conditions that must be met to ensure no evolution is taking place, if the observed and expected results do not match then one of those conditions was not met. Other deviations from Hardy-Weinberg may result from inbreeding, population stratification and sexual selection (Balding, 2006). This leads to the hypothesis in that due to a small initial population size of 20 flies not all of the conditions for Hardy-Weinberg will be met resulting in evolution taking

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