A Mixed Model of Mutation for Electrophoretic Identity of Proteins within and between Populations

Abstract

A model which is a mixture of the model of infinite alleles and the Ohta-Kimura model of stepwise mutation has been proposed for the study of eletcrophoretic variants in natural populations. Mutations which alter the mobility of a protein are divided into two classes: stepwise mutations and nonstepwise mutations. It is assumed that stepwise mutations follow the Ohta-Kimura model while nonstepwise mutations follow the infinite allele model. It is then shown that even if the proportion of nonstepwise mutations is only 5%, with the other 95% stepwise mutations, the effective number of alleles given by the present model is considerably larger than that given by the Ohta-Kimura model of stepwise mutation. The result has also been applied to study Nei's genetic distance.