The genes are responsible for the physical characteristics in an individual. The expression of the genes or the variants of a particular gene ( alleles ) is what that makes the difference in the expression of a trait.
For a particular trait, if we do not know or not interested in knowing the responsible gene , can we predict the allele frequency and the genotype frequency in a given population based on the clinical observation of that particular trait. Experts please help.
Dear Jayasankar
The calculation of gene frequency needs to detect the degree of dominance between alleles (complete dominance, codominance, ...) and the number of alleles deals with the gene locus( two alleles or multiple alleles), so you must know the nature of heredity of trait before calculate the gene frequency. But we can calculate the phenotypic frequency for a diversity of phenotypes as a percentage from the total.
Good Luck
Dear Jayasankar,
From statistical point of view, you can predict genotype/haplotype frequency but you need to bear in mind that you have to consider a large sample in order to overcome rarity of some genotypes in a particular locus. You may also have to consider your sample to be under the same physical characteristics(phenotypes) , which is quite hard to be achieved in many cases specially within the mixed population. So, my advice is to consider the sample that come from the same ancestor with similar phenotypes of interest.