BBC Wildlife Magazine

The phenotype: nature via nurture

ANY OBSERVABLE CHARACTERISTIC or combination of traits – not just something like colour or behaviour, but features you can’t easily see, such as physiology – are known as an organism’s phenotype. These features are a product of genes and influenced by the environment – so a phenotype is the physical manifestation of genetic instructions.

What’s the genotype?

The genotype is the combination of genes that produces

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