Heterozygosity in Population Genetics
In population genetics, the concept of heterozygosity is commonly extended to refer to the population as a whole, i.e., the fraction of individuals in a population that are heterozygous for a particular locus. It can also refer to the fraction of loci within an individual that are heterozygous.
Typically, the observed and expected heterozygosities are compared, defined as follows for diploid individuals in a population:
- Observed
where is the number of individuals in the population, and are the alleles of individual at the target locus.
- Expected
where is the number of alleles at the target locus, and is the allele frequency of the allele at the target locus.
Read more about this topic: Homozygote
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)