parental type

A parental-type offspring is the one that keeps the same allele pairing its parent had, the unsurprising result. If a parent carried red-and-tall together, a parental-type offspring inherits red-and-tall together too, with no reshuffling of those two genes.

Parental types arise when no crossing over separates the linked genes being followed, so the alleles travel into the gamete in their original groupings. For linked genes they are the majority class, because crossovers between any two nearby genes happen in only a minority of meioses.

Parental types and recombinants are counted together in mapping crosses. The fewer recombinants relative to parental types, the more tightly two genes are linked. When two genes assort independently, parental and recombinant offspring appear in roughly equal numbers, and the parental category loses its majority.