Question

a. What is the effect of inbreeding on allele frequencies in a population?

b. What is the effect of inbreeding on genotype frequencies?

In an inbred population, what effect would you expect to see in regard to rare recessive diseases?

Answer 1

Ans) a. Effects. Inbreeding increases the chances of the expression of deleterious recessive alleles by increasing homozygosity and therefore has the potential to decrease the fitness of the offspring.

b. Inbreeding causes a loss of heterozygosity with no expected change in allele frequencies. Whenever deleterious alleles are at least partially recessive, inbreeding exposes these alleles in homozygotes and causes a decrease in the mean fitness of individuals within the population.

c. By inbreeding, individuals are further decreasing genetic variation by increasing homozygosity in the genomes of their offspring. Thus, the likelihood of deleterious recessive alleles to pair is significantly higher in a small inbreeding population than in a larger inbreeding population.