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What can cause a change in allele frequency

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I need to understand the answer to the following multiple choice question.

Which of the following causes changes in allele frequencies?

a. genetic drift
b. mutation
c. natural selection
d. gene flow from migration
e. all of these

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Solution Summary

In this solution you will find the definitions and explanations of what allele frequency is and the various events that can cause the allele frequency of a given population to change. You will learn about what genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection are and how they are related to allele frequency. You will also learn about mutations and how they generate different alleles.

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When studying the flow of genetic information in a population you are studying something called the allele frequency of a gene. Remember, every gene is a piece of DNA that controls a particular trait in the cell. For each gene there can be more than one version of the gene, for instance the eye color gene can have two versions, a blue version or a brown version. These versions of a gene are called alleles. The allele frequency of a population describes how many people have a brown eye allele compared to how many have a blue eyed allele. For instance a population of 100 alleles could have 70 brown alleles and 30 blue alleles. This makes the population frequency 70% for brown and 30% for blue. If something were to happen to the people with blue ...

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