The frequency of an autosomal recessive condition is 0.001 (1 in 1000) in a population.
What is the frequency of carriers of the mutant allele?

Question

The frequency of an autosomal recessive condition is 0.001 (1 in 1000) in a population.

What is the frequency of carriers of the mutant allele?

Accepted Answer

Hey, everyone. Let's take a look at this question together. A population has an autosomal recessive condition with a frequency of 0.5. What is the expected proportion of homozygous wild type individuals in the population? Is it answer choice? A 0.5% answer choice B 1% answer choice C 86% or answer choice D 99.5%. Let's work this problem out together to try to figure out which of the following percentages represent represents the expected proportion of homozygous wild type individuals in the population. So, since we are talking about the population having an autosomal recessive condition, we note that that condition is represented in the individuals with the homozygous recessive genotype. And we can recall from the Hardy Weinberg equilibrium equation that the homozygous recessive genotype is represented as Q squared, which means that the frequency of Q squared is equal to 0.5. And since we want to note the expected proportion of Homozygous wild type individuals, we want to determine the frequency of the homozygous dominant, which we can also recall from the Hardy Weinberg equilibrium equation that the Homozygous dominant individuals are represented as P squared. So in order to find P squared, we have to figure out the value for P, which we can get from the value of Q since P plus Q is equal to one. And since Q squared is equal to 0.5, the value for Q is equal to the square root of 0.5, which means that Q is equal to 0.71. And we note that P is equal to one minus Q. So P is equal to one minus 0.71, which means that the value for P is equal to 0.929. And so P squared is equal to the value of P which is 0.929 squared, which is equal to 0.863, which means that 86.3% of the individuals in the population have the homozygous wild type genotype making answer choice. C the correct answer. I hope you found this video to be helpful. Thank you and goodbye.

The frequency of an autosomal recessive condition is 0.001 (1 in 1000) in a population.
What is the frequency of carriers of the mutant allele?

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Hardy-Weinberg Principle

Autosomal Recessive Inheritance

Carrier Frequency Calculation