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Term for phenotypes that when put together result in a different phenotype?

What is the biological term for a genotype/or phenotype that can result in a "hybrid"?

Like hair texture: a curly-haired parent and a parent with straight hair can have a child with a hair texture that meets in the middle. What's the biological term for that?

And do eye colors (blue + green = a blue-green color) or plants (red + white = pink color) have that similar quality?

All help appreciated!

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  • 1 decade ago
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    There are a few terms that could fit this.

    One would be incomplete dominance, where the heterozygous condition is an intermediate between the two homozygous phenotypes (red flower RR x white flower rr = pink flower Rr) so that neither of the parental pjenotypes is shown.

    A second would be codominance, where the heterozygous condition contains the phenotypes of both parents (red flower RR x white flower rr = red and white striped or spotted flower Rr).

    Another, if two separate genes are involved is called epistasis. A well known example of this is the coat color in Labrador retreivers. Here, one gene codes for coat color, and the second codes for the expression of the first. The gene that codes for color only codes for the phenotypes black and chocolate. But you have probably seen yellow labs (not golden reteivers, which are a different breed, but yellow Labradors). To get a yellow lab, the gene for coat color expression has to be in the recessive form. If it's dominant, you will only get black and chocolate labs: http://www.blueknightlabs.com/color/coatcolor.html

    Eye color isn't determined by a single gene (despite what you learn in high school biology, it's just a convenience to use it). Otherwise, how would you get so many different eye colors (brown, hazel, blue, green, gray, violet). There are several genes involved in determining the actual color inheritance for eye color, the same with hair color and skin color. This type of trait is said to be controlled by polygenetic inheritance (poly = many, genetic = genes). As a "simple" example of this, imagine there are only two genes for flower color, red (R) and white (r), with the red being dominant. But say there are three different pairs of genes. You could have

    RR, RR, RR = dark red

    RR, RR, Rr = red

    RR, RR, rr = rose

    RR, Rr, rr = dark pink

    RR, rr, rr = pink

    Rr, rr, rr = light pink

    rr, rr, rr = white

    So depending on how many of the genes have the dominant form of the allele determines the exact shade of the color of the flower.

  • 1 decade ago

    The term is "polygenic." It applies toward skin or hair color, height, eye color, etc.

    Plants fall under something called "incomplete dominance," where an intermediate phenotype is produced by two parents (like the red and white flower producing a pink flower).

    Hope this helps!

    Source(s): My Bio 111 class
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