Genetic control of resistance to human malaria Essay

Your assignment is to read Anthony Allison’s article about selection on the human genome due to malarial infection and answer the following questions in the form of an essay (just answering the questions one by one will not be sufficient):
 How would natural selection increase the frequency of an allele that confers resistance to a disease within a population?
 There are many different mutations of human alleles that confer a degree of innate resistance to malaria (HbS, thalassemias, G6PD, PK deficiency, DARC, CD40, etc.). What might explain the prevalence of so many different mutations? The many different mutations could be seen as what form of evolution? Why?
 Suppose a new, environmentally friendly way to keep mosquitoes from passing on malaria was invented. (See http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/04/disease-proof-mosquito-could-spr.html for recent news on this possibility!) What might be expected to occur to the frequency of alleles that confer disease resistance? What about alleles that are most efficient in the heterozygote (such as HbS)?
 Pyruvate kinase (PK) deficiency works by creating an environment unfriendly to the growth of the malaria parasite. Hypothetically, if scientists came up with a treatment for malaria, they could suppress the amount of PK in infected individuals. If they were to distribute this new drug, what might be expected to happen in the infected human population? What could possibly occur in the malaria parasite population?

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