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Extraordinary Incidence of Electrophoretically Silent Genetic Polymorphisms

Abstract

ELECTROPHORETICALLY detected genetic polymorphisms are ubiquitous. In man, for example, they emerged by chance in two1,2 out of four1–4 kinds of protein examined in this laboratory during 1960–1962. Since then, polymorphisms have been documented for about 33 % of those human loci5 and as many as 80% of those Drosophila loci6 whose products can be analysed electrophoretically. Despite this abundance, the variation represented by electrophoretically detected polymorphism is comparatively restricted. In general, no more than a few kinds of frequent alleles can be detected at any one locus. At three haemoglobin loci (α, β, and δ), for example, a total of only five kinds of variant alleles with frequencies > 0.03 were found in a survey of 404 individuals representing nine primate genera7. Thus, among 3×2×440 = 2,640 allele products, the incidence of different kinds of common variant alleles was 5/2,640.

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BOYER, S. Extraordinary Incidence of Electrophoretically Silent Genetic Polymorphisms. Nature 239, 453–454 (1972). https://doi.org/10.1038/239453a0

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