Final answer:
The genetic structure of the population can be determined by calculating allele frequencies from the given genotypes. The calculated allele frequency of Y was found to be approximately 0.42 and of y to be approximately 0.58, which differs from the provided frequencies of 0.60 and 0.40, indicating a possible error or non-equilibrium population.
Step-by-step explanation:
To solve for the genetic structure of a population with 12 homozygous recessive individuals (yy), 8 homozygous dominant individuals (YY), and 4 heterozygous individuals (Yy), we must determine the frequency of each allele. The total number of alleles for this gene is twice the number of individuals, since each individual carries two alleles. Therefore, there are 24 alleles from the homozygous recessive individuals (yy), 16 alleles from the homozygous dominant individuals (YY), and 8 alleles from the heterozygous individuals (Yy), amounting to 48 alleles in total.
The frequency of the dominant allele (Y) is calculated by adding the number of Y alleles from the YY and Yy individuals and dividing by the total number of alleles. This results in:
(2×8) + (1×4) = 16 + 4 = 20
20 / 48 = 0.4167, approximately 0.42 when rounded to two decimal places.
The frequency of the recessive allele (y) is the remainder when subtracted from 1, since there are only two alleles for this gene (Y and y) and their frequencies must sum to 1. Hence the frequency of y would be:
1 - 0.42 = 0.58.
Note that the initially provided allele frequencies of Y = 0.60 and y = 0.40 do not match with the calculated frequencies from the population's genotype data, suggesting that there may be an error or this population is not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.