Alleles And Hardy Weinberg

This week we did lots of number crunching with calculating allele distribution in populations. Most of these where mock populations but we did talk about how sickle-cell anemia and malaria is related. The main concept is that if you are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia you have an advantage when fighting off malaria, heteroygous simply means that you have only one of the needed alleles for a gene to be expressed. This video can explain in much better detail then I can about how alleles, sickle-cell anemia, and malaria are all related to each other https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsbhvl2nVNE

Another subject we covered was Hardy Weinberg equilibrium, which is the idea of that if there was a population that had no outside sources influencing it how the genetic diversity should spread. In concept it seems fairly useless but it makes for a fantastic baseline to see how genes flow in the real world. This Khan Academy video explains what a Hardy Weinberg equilibrium is and how it should function:  https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/her/heredity-and-genetics/v/hardy-weinberg