As discussed here, lets start the certainly painful discussion on where in the COB hierarchy phenotype (the biological condition, not to be confused in the information item "phenotypic finding", which already exist).

I would also like to be able to keep this discussion a bit separate from normal/abnormal (thats for the Phenotype Reconciliation effort to figure out, not COB IMO). Maybe lets start with gathering some basic "a phenotype is" discussions.

Maybe before we start anything, lets start with a reasonable rough definition on nature.com and see how we go from there.

The term "phenotype" refers to the observable physical properties of an organism; these include the organism's appearance, development, and behavior. An organism's phenotype is determined by its genotype, which is the set of genes the organism carries, as well as by environmental influences upon these genes.

This already shows that defining phenotype as any one thing is going to be complex. Here are some example phenotypes:

• "abnormally increased head size"
• "erratic behaviour"
• "abnormality of the cardivascular system"
• "behaviour phenotype" (unqualified phenotype -> this is a bit confusing, but often used as grouping classes in FYPO, MP and others)
• "normal behaviour" (indistinguishable from wildtype - please lets not discuss THIS here, that's going to break all cans of worms loose.. We dont need to care about this for COB))

These are some examples of non-phenotypes:

• "head size" (this is a trait)
• "behaviour" (this is a, I dont know, process or something similar)
• "erratic" (this is a phenotypic quality)

So, this issue is NOT about normal/abnormal/pathological etc. Its about where in the COB hierarchy a observable physical properties of an organism should be placed.

@sbello @dosumis @seger @srobb1 @chris-grove @mah11 @nicolevasilevsky @Clare72 @ybradford (please tag all those pheno-heroes I have missed now).