You have cultivated a people-friendly garden of Toxicodendron radicans. The7water you used on these plants emanates from the discharge of a leaky, local,nuclear, power plant. Upon studying these plants, you learn that 16% of themcan cause death within 2 min of exposure. This killing ability happens to be arecessive trait. Assume the dominant allele confers complete dominance. Findthe following:% that do not have this abilityFrequency of the recessive allele

The different variants of a particular gene that specifies a particular character are referred to as alleles. The allele that is responsible for the the dominant phenotype is referred to as the wild-type allele and the other allele that specifies for the mutant phenotype is referred to as the recessive allele. When present together, the expression of the recessive allele is suppressed by the dominant allele according to the law of dominance. The recessive (mutant) phenotype is expressed only when two recessive alleles are present.Let us assume that the frequency of the dominant and recessive alleles be p and q respectively. According to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, p+q=1. (1) The frequency of plants that are homozygous dominant and homozygous recessive are assumed to be p2 and q2 respectively, where p and q are the frequencies of the dominant allele and the recessive allele respectively. The frequency of the plant that are heterozygous dominant is 2pq. According to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, p2+q2+2pq=1. (2) It is given that 16% of the plants are homozygous recessive and so the value of q2=0.16, from which the value of q was estimated to be 0.4. Using this value in equation (1), we estimate the value of p to be 0.6. Percentage of plants that are homozygous dominant can be calculated by the expression p2 which is estimated to be 0.36. Percentage of plants that are heterozygous dominant can be calculated by the expression 2pq which is estimated to be 0.48. The percentage of plants that do not have the killing ability includes plants that are homozygous dominant and heterozygous dominant and is calculated as: 0.36+0.48=0.84 Conclusion: The percentage of plants that do not have the killing ability is 0.84 The frequency of the recessive allele (q) is 0.4