Open AccessGenetics of Zoarces populations
Author(s) -
FRYDENBERG OVE,
SIMONSEN VIBEKE
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
hereditas
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.819
H-Index - 50
eISSN - 1601-5223
pISSN - 0018-0661
DOI - 10.1111/j.1601-5223.1973.tb01163.x
Subject(s) - biology , loss of heterozygosity , locus (genetics) , genetics , allele , evolutionary biology , allele frequency , gene , population genetics , zoology , population , demography , sociology
Hemoglobin and 23 enzymes have been scored for electrophoretic variants in two presumably large populations of Zoarces viviparus L. The 24 proteins investigated are supposedly determined by 32 gene loci. Using the criterion that a locus is polymorphic when it carries two or more alleles each occurring with a gene frequency of at least 0.01, 28 and 31 per cent of the loci were found to be polymorphic in the two populations. The degree of heterozygosity, i.e. the average percentage of loci heterozygous in a randomly chosen individual, was eight and ten per cent respectively. This degree of heterozygosity is higher than recent estimates for man, a number of rodents and reptiles and three species of rockfish. On the other hand, the degree observed is of the order of magnitude of estimates obtained for two other species of bony fishes, and it is decidedly smaller than most estimates available for various Drosophila species. The hypothesis proposed by G illispie and K ojima (1968), that glucose‐metabolizing enzymes tend to be less polymorphic than non‐glucose‐metabolizing enzymes, is not supported by the data from Zoarces.