Wild type

Wild type, sometimes written wildtype or wild-type, is the typical form of an organism, strain, gene, or characteristic as it occurs in nature. Wild type refers to the most common phenotype in the natural population. Wild type also refers to the allele at each locus required to produce the wild-type phenotype. Wild type is the standard of reference for the genotype and phenotype. As the standard, wild type is not considered dominant or recessive. Mutant alleles are dominant or recessive in comparison to wild type.

In biology it relates specifically to the difference between a naturally occurring organism, and one that has been deliberately mutated. Site-directed mutagenesis is a research technique that allows for the mutation of specific nucleotides in the gene sequence of a wildtype gene.

Mutant is an antonym of wildtype.