Epitype
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An additional, clarifying type (specimen or illustration) of a species or lower-order taxon, provided when the holotype and paratypes from the original classification are demonstrably ambiguous or insufficient.
"It is clear, therefore, where any epitype, selected as an interpretive type, should be sought. The selection of an epitype, in the absence of type or authentic material, would be important, for any further molecular work will need to have available a culture of the type species of the genus which has some nomenclatural standing, i.e. a culture derived from the epitype."
- 2 An epigenetic alteration in a gene.
"To test this hypothesis our discussion is focused on finding evidence for gene-specific epitypes that supports or rejects cause-and-effect relationships between genotype, epitype and phenotype.[…]The first approach (A) examines the penetrance of transgenerationally inherited epitypes that are known to activate or silence the expression of disease related gene(s), which in turn correlate with onset of the "aberrant" disease phenotypes.[…]The second and less direct approach (B) searches out epitypes that are duplicated, as DNA sequences are duplicated, and examines multiple copies of DNA sequence and epitype that have been evolutionarily co-conserved."
Example
More examples"It is clear, therefore, where any epitype, selected as an interpretive type, should be sought. The selection of an epitype, in the absence of type or authentic material, would be important, for any further molecular work will need to have available a culture of the type species of the genus which has some nomenclatural standing, i.e. a culture derived from the epitype."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.