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hybrid

A Dictionary of Zoology | Date: 1999

hybrid
1. An individual animal that results from a cross between parents of differing genotypes. Strictly, most individuals in an outbreeding population are hybrids, but the term is more usually reserved for cases in which the parents are individuals whose genomes are sufficiently distinct for them to be recognized as different species or subspecies. A good example is the mule, produced by cross-breeding an ass and a horse (each of which can breed true as a species). Hybrids may be fertile or sterile depending on qualitative and/or quantitative differences in the genomes of the two parents. Hybrids like the mule, whose parents are of different species, are frequently sterile.

2. By analogy, any heterozygote. Each heterozygote represents dissimilar alleles at a given locus, and this difference results from a cross between parental gametes possessing differing alleles at that locus.

3. (graft hybrid) See GRAFT.


© A Dictionary of Zoology 1999, originally published by Oxford University Press 1999.