Consider 2 possible studies a In one you capture 3000 wild m

Consider 2 possible studies, (a) In one you capture 3000 wild male Drosophila melanogaster, mate each with laboratory females heterozygous for the autosomal recessive allele vg (vestigial, which causes miniature wings when homozygous), and examine each male’s offspring. You find that half of the offspring of each of three males have miniature wings and have genotype vgvg. (b) In another study, you determine the nucleotide sequence of 1000 base pairs for 20 copies of the cytochrome b gene, taken 20 wild mallard ducks. You find that at each of 30 nucleotide sites, one or another gene copy has a different base pair from all others. From these data, can you estimate the rate of mutation from the wild type to the vg allele (case a) or from one base pair to another (case b)? why or why not?

Solution

From the above data it is clear that the change in vgvg occurs due to the mutation. So we can determine the mutation rate .

According to the question, the mutation number in 3000 population is 500.

Thus the mutation rate is = (500/3000)*100 = 16.67%