wild-type allele [GENO_0000501]

wild-type allele

ID: GENO_0000501

An allele representing a highly common varaint (typically >99% in a population), that typically exhibits canonical function, and against which rare and/or non-functional mutant alleles are often compared.

'Wild-type' is typically contrasted with 'mutant', where 'wild-type' indicates a highly prevalent allele in a population (typically >99%), and/or some prototypical allele in a background genome that serves as a basis for some experimental alteration to generate a mutant allele, which can be selected for in establishing a mutant strain. The notion of wild-type alleles is more common in model organism databases, where specific mutations are generated against a wild-type reference feature. Wild-type alleles are typically but not always used as reference alleles in sequence comparison/analysis applications. More than one wild-type sequence can exist for a given feature, but typically only one allele is deemed wild-type iin the context of a single dataset or analysis.