Cell Gene

The most basic definition of a “gene” is that it is a “molecular unit of heredity of a living organism.” It is a term used to describe and define some stretches of deoxyribonucleic acid and ribonucleic acid (DNA and RNA, respectively), which has very specific functions in cells. All living cells depend on genes, which are crucial in specifying all the proteins and the functional RNA chains in the cell. Genes are also the molecules that contain information to build and maintain the cells within the organism’s body, including the passing of genetic traits to the cell’s offspring. All living organisms have different genes that correspond to a wide variety of biological traits that they possess. One of the most useful and more modern definitions of the gene is “a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and/or other functional sequence regions.” (Pearson, 2006) However, the colloquial usage of the term—such as in the phrase “good genes”—might actually refer to an allele instead of a gene. In the simplest terms, the gene is the basic “instruction” (or a sequence of nucleic acids). On the other hand, an allele is only a variant of the gene. Most people have the genes for a specific trait, but only a couple of them will have the allele, which could then result to a variation of the trait. Genes code for proteins, and this coding might result in various biological traits, but it is truly the gene—and not the trait—that is inherited by the offspring from one or both parents. This category contains scientific information about the gene, which is the basic molecular unit of heredity of a cell.