What is a “gene pool”?
The “gene pool” is the total of all genes, or genetic information, in any population, usually of a particular species. If you raise lab rats from a limited set of parents, the gene pool would be the genes of all the parent rats. Most of the genes will be identical, the interesting thing will be the variations. In the case of lab rats, your parents (that is, the ones you use to birth new rats, not *your* parents) have probably already had most of the variation bred out, so they will all be white and about the same size, etc. If you were to take two rat parents at random out of the wild, you would almost certainly have much more gene pool diversity and variation of offspring. Many simple organisms reproduce by dividing themselves. Normally both parts will have identical DNA, so if you put one in a petri dish and let it multiply, you could have a huge population with no gene pool diversity: every member of the population could have identical genes and therefore represent the entire gene p
