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Asked by albamuja to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 15 Jun 2011.
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Mona Gharaie answered on 13 Jun 2011:
The genotype describes the genes inherited by an organism. Phenotype refers to an individual’s anatomical structure,physiology and behaviour. The phenotype refers to everything that can be easily observed and measured about an plant, animal or human being.
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Joseph Finlayson answered on 13 Jun 2011:
To add to Mona’s comment the genotype is the sum of all of the genes in a cell, organism, or the individual. The genes that code for living organisms, including humans could be seen as the architect’s plan for a house.
The phenotype, as Mona points out, is the thing that is observed in the individual. When we look at the house, we don’t see the plans, we see the end result of the plans interacting with the enviroment – builders and so on.
The same is with genes, our genotype provides the plans for our bodies – they might code for athletic ability, brown hair, or high intelligence but the result of our genotype interacting with our enviroment as we grow leads to our phenotype. If we eat burgers all day, then even though our genotype might code for athletic ability, scoffing burgers will make it so our athletic ability is low.
What is really interesting is epigenetics. It turns out, that not all our genes are ‘switched on’ all the time. Our enviroment in fact, makes parts of our genes active or not. So it seems that the lines between genotype and phenotype are possibly quite blurred.
Any more questions, just shoot
– Joe
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Michael Taggart answered on 13 Jun 2011:
A good question as the popular press don’t really know the difference and will often say something like “gene A found to cause cancer …” or something like this. Mona and Joe’s replies cover your question well. I usually think of these things at the level of a single cell and work my way up. It might sound controversial to say it (but it isn’t really) but genes don’t directly cause any such thing as a disease; they simply are the code for making particular proteins in the cell. So, the genotype is a term used to describe the compliment of genes expressed in a cell or tissue or organ at any one point in time. That in turn will code for a certain compliment of proteins to be expressed (sometimes this may be called the proteome). It is the types of proteins, and how they interact with each other, that DIRECTLY determines how a cell/tissue/organ functions. And how the cell, tissue, organ, and eventually the organism (i.e. like you or me) works at a particular moment in time is termed its phenotype.
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Jen Gupta answered on 14 Jun 2011:
I think the others have answered this question far better than I could – especially as I hated biology at school and stopped learning it as soon as I could!
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Emma Bennett answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Everyone else has answered this really well so I’ll just give a quick example which might help you understand it even better.
You can think of the genotype as being similar to the ingredients that make up a cake, when all the ingredients are stirred together that makes a cake mix – the genotype in this example. What the cake finally looks like we’ll call the phenotype. Now a cake mix being all gooey does not look very similar to a cake and so you have to cook it. Cooking would represent the environmental effects that interact with the genotype (cake mix) to give an organism its final phenotype (cooked cake). Obviously the oven temperature and time that you try cooking the cake mix for will affect what it finally looks like (especially if you forget about it) so this shows that different environments can affect the genotype in different ways and therefore give rise to unique phenotypes.
I hope this helps and it hasn’t confused you further.
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