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
