What does "phenocopy" mean?

A phenotypic variation (in an organism) that resembles a phenotype from a genetic cause but has an environmental rather than genetic cause (and thus is not inherited).

What is a synonym for "phenocopy"?

Common synonyms include: phenoconvert.

Phenocopy

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A phenotypic variation (in an organism) that resembles a phenotype from a genetic cause but has an environmental rather than genetic cause (and thus is not inherited).

Verb

1
To copy a genetic variation through environmental manipulation.
"The wg- mutant can be phenocopied by injecting antisense RNA (complementary to the 3 kb wg+ transcript) into wild-type embryos."

Synonyms

All synonyms

phenoconvert

Example

More examples

"The wg- mutant can be phenocopied by injecting antisense RNA (complementary to the 3 kb wg+ transcript) into wild-type embryos."

Etymology

From pheno- + copy.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.