Topics 4-8 Flashcards
What are the principles of the Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium?
- Infinitely large population
- Random mating
- No selection for/against phenotypes
- No net migration
- No net mutation
Is allele variation greater in small or larger pops?
“Greater in smaller
Consider the impact of killing 30 humans from a population of 200, vs 30 in a pop of 1 million, what impact does this have on allele frequency?
How does drift affect genotypic ratios?
Any change in allele frequency results in very large change in pheno frequencies, but drift may result in more bad homozygosities (since non selectional, bad phenotypes aren’t selected against)
Drift may decrease diversity as well (could also increase it), or cause fixation (e.g kill all the remaining 10 smart humans by accident and youll fix the stupid genes)
What is the expected number of heterozygotes?
2pq(1-F) (recall F means autozygous, so remove any potential for heteros)
What does inbreeding do to allelic frequencies?
nothing, but will increase chance of autozygosity (recall grandpa example, you may be less diverse than grandpa)
How to calculate the inbreeding coefficient?
2pq-observed(heterozygotes)
/
2pq
What does polygenetic mean?
Trait influenced by many loci
What is the difference in broad sense vs narrow sense heritability?
Broad sense heritability
reflects all of the genetic contributions to a trait’s phenotypic variance, including additive, dominant, and epistatic gene effects. It also includes influences of the parent phenotype (maternal and paternal effects) on the environment of offspring that can cause siblings to resemble each other.
Narrow sense heritability
more accurately reflects the contributions of specific, additive components of genetic variation to offspring.
What does hertability measure?
Proportion of phenotypic variances attributable to genetics
When the selection differential is larger, what does this mean?
- Selective pressure is stronger(strength of selection)
- Individuals who differ more from the mean have higher reproductive success
REcallselection intensity is different, it is a measure of the change in mean value/phenotypipic standard deviation
What is the formula for intensity of selection?
Za-Zb/SD(phenotype)
Note”Za and Zb are the mean sizes of the traits(ie means)
What is the formula for the selection variance?
j=Va-Vb/Vb
j is selection on variance
Where V is the variance, a and b are after and before
What are the important conclusions of the experiment on Daphne Major?
- Intensity of selection may vary
- Direction of selective presure can change
- Evolution in morphology can be quite fast!
What is ecological character displacement?
Evolution is driven by competition in a way such that the species involved evolve to reduce overlap in resource use/niche
What is selective sweep?
Very strong selection for favourable alles to be fixed
What is hitchhiking?
Loci on either side of allele (being selected for) increase in frequency due to another gene undergoing a selective sweep
In particular, what causes the loss of armour in freshwater 3 spined sticklebacks?
Lack of nutrients
Lack of predation (predators less common in lakes)
What does the selection gradient measure?
The degree to which selection is occuring
What are orthologs?
Homologous sequences separated by speciation
Occur in different species
Where are paralogs found?
Within the same species, due to duplication event
Paralogs are homologous sequences
What are the pros and cons of molecular phylogenies?
Pros:
- Character state identification is unambigious
(compared with morphology)
- Millions of states available to construct trees
Cons:
- Require extant taxa
-DNA only lasts approximately 100k years, and will be fragmented
- Harder to determine homology vs homoplasy (since independent mutation can causef same change, and sequence may appear ancestral)
Outline the principles for the common methods of molecular phylogenetic construction
- Maximum Parsimony
- simplest tree is best
- give greater weight to trees less prone to homoplasy
- - Neighbor joining
- build trees based on genetic distance of taxa (do not need to know ancestral derived traits)
- needs lots of data
3.Maximum likelihood
- takes advantage knowing mutations are more likely to occur in certain DNA regions - Bayesian
- uses inverse probability
- tweak a tree until you reach its maximum probability
Note: ML and Bayesian in particular can require days, and lots of comput
True or False:
Human genetic variation is greatest outside of Africa because the evolutionary background?
FALSE:
Greatest variation is IN AFRICA
This is a benefit of molecular phylogenies,
Define neutral evolution
Much of variation observed in genome was due to drift, rather than natural selection
What are the predictions of neutral evolution?
- Rate of mutation is constant/predictable
- Mutations should accumulate more rapidly in areas of genome that dont influence phenotype (synnonymous mutations occur more rapidly then non-synonymous)
e.g pseudogene
What is neutral theory?
Null hypothesis for no natural selection
(most variation has no impact on fitness)
If rates of mutation differ -> null hypothesis rejected -> selection could be taking place
What is some evidence for neutral theory?
Linear relationship of mutation accumulation of cytochrome c gene in pairs of mammals, with time
What is the point behind a molecular clock
Give an example of its use
Since neutral mutations accumulate at constant rate as per neutral theory, can look at mutation differences to estimate divergence time of taxa
e.g more mutations between species indicates longer time since divergence
Clock tells you how much time has passed, you must also have anchor!
When are molecular clocks inaccurate?
- When determining relations among species that are long diverged
- ## Reversals can occur too
;……………………………………………………………..
What is the relation of differentiation between two closely related species?
Differentiation slope will be great, but will eventually plateau because mutations will begin to overwrite old sequences