question_answer 39)

  Among the five factors that are known to affect Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, three factors are gene flow, genetic drift and genetic recombination. What are the other two factors?

Answer:

                  The other two factors that affect Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium are mutation and natural selection. Mutation is a sudden heritable change in an organism which is generally due to change in the base sequence of the nucleic acid in the organism's genome. Microbial experiments show that pre-existing advantageous mutations when selected will result in formation of new phenotypes. Over few generations, this would result in speciation .Thus, resulting in changed frequency of genes and alleles. Natural selection is a phenomenon by which organisms possessing heritable variations enabling their better survival reproduce and leave greater number of progeny than their counterpart. It can lead to stabilization (in which more individuals acquire mean character value),directional change (more individuals acquire value other than the mean character value) or disruption (more individuals acquire peripheral character value at both ends of the distribution curve).