Question

Familial hypercholesterolemia, an autosomal dominant disease, is five times more frequent in the Afrikaner population of South Africa than in the original population of Europe from which the ancestors to the Afrikaners emigrated. This represents an example of:____________.1. Kin selection2. Bottleneck3. Natural selection4. The founder effect

Answer 1

Founder effect

Step-by-step explanation:

It has been proposed

that the high frequency is due to a founder effect. In this paper, we

characterized 24 mutant LDL receptor alleles from 12 Afrikaner

individuals homozygous for FH. We identified two mutations that

together makeup greater than 95% of the mutant LDL receptor genes

represented in our sample. Both mutations were basepair

substitutions that result in single-amino acid changes. Each

mutation can be detected readily with the polymerase chain reaction

and restriction analysis. The finding of two common LDL receptor

mutations in the Afrikaner FH homozygotes predicts that these

mutations will predominate in the Afrikaner population and that the

high frequency of FH is due to a founder effect. The increased

incidence of ischemic heart disease in the Afrikaner population may

in part be due to the high frequency of these two mutations in the

LDL receptor gene.

Answer 2

4. The founder effect

Step-by-step explanation:

The founder effect is a mechanism originally proposed by Sewall Wright (1942) for which a population is established by a few individuals derived from a larger population. The founder effect is used in population genetics to explain the mechanisms underlying gene flow among populations