The Effects of Heritability and Inbreeding on HIV

1) The estimated value of h^2 for HIV is 0.54 (1). This suggests that the affect of selection on the trait is half and half. Which means that the heritability of HIV is somewhat similar to that of the previous generation. The offspring are similar to their parents. "Most traits and most populations fall somewhere in the middle with offpring showing a moderate resemblence to their parents which is evidence that the variation among individuals is partly due to variation in their environments and partly due to variation in their genes"(2).

2) Inbreeding would reduce the variability of the HIV virus across the entire genome. The parents and offspring would share the same genes which would likely decrease the fitness. Thus inbreeding would affect the evolution of allelic frequencies by increasing the exposure of recessive phenotypes to natural selection. This would likely mean that the types of HIV would become very similar and over time the strands found in one individual will be similar to those in another.

1)http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=18288889
2)Freeman, Scott and Jon C. Herron. Evolutionary Analysis. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ; Prentice Hall, 2007.