Snapdragons, a flowering plant popular with gardeners, can have red, white, and pink colored petals. When snapdragons with red petals (RW) are crossed with snapdragons having white (WW) petals, the offspring have pink petals. The pink coloration (RW) is a phenotype in between the red and white parental phenotypes. What is this kind of inheritance pattern called?

Answer: incomplete dominance

This example shows the incomplete dominance. It is a form of intermediate inheritance in which one allele for a specific trait is not completely expressed over its paired allele. This results in a third phenotype in which the expressed physical trait is a combination of the phenotypes of both alleles.

Here in this example pink colored petals are expressed due to the combination of two phenotypes red and white colored petals. The parental phenotypes are not expressed completely over other.

incomplete dominance.