STATISTICAL POWER OF AN EXACT TEST OF HARDY-WEINBERG PROPORTIONS OF GENOTYPIC DATA AT A MULTIALLELIC LOCUS

A computer algorithm for numerical evaluation of the statistical power of an exact test of Hardy-Weinberg genotypic proportions (HWP), devel oped here, indicates that the power is dependent on the number of segr egating alleles as well as allele frequencies. While low levels of dep arture from the null hypothesis are difficult to detect from single-lo cus data, should such deviation be due to population substructuring, m ultiple loci, at each of which the number of segregating alleles is la rge (as seen with hypervariable loci), may easily detect even low leve ls of departure from HWP. Undetected small levels of departure may sti ll provide conservative? estimates of genotype frequencies from allele frequency data, following the current practice in forensic genetics.