ISOALLELE FREQUENCIES IN VERY LARGE POPULATIONS

The frequencies of electrophoretically distinguishable allelic forms of enzymes may be very different from the corresponding frequencies of structurally distinct forms, because many sequence variants may have identical electrophoretic charge. In large populations such frequencies will be determined largely by the number of amino acid sites that are free to vary. The number of distinguishable electrophoretic variants will remain fairly small. Beyond some limiting size, no further effect of population size on allele frequencies is expected, so isolated large populations will have closely similar allele frequencies if polymorphism is due largely to mutation and drift. The most common electrophoretic alleles are expected to be flanked by the next most common, with the rarer alleles increasingly distal. Neither strong selection nor mutation/drift interpretations of enzyme polymorphism are yet disproven, nor is any point between these extremes.