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What Is A Gene?

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What is a gene?
The word Gene derives from the Greek “genesis” (birth) or “genos” (origin) and was first coined by Wilhelm Johannsen in 1909. At that time, little or nothing was known about the existence of DNA, and the word gene was used to describe the Mendelian concept of a phenotypical trait that is transmitted through inheritance (Johansen, 1909).
The gene as the fundamental unit of heredity is the original meaning of the word as first geneticists intended it. This essentially explains the reason why, during last century, a burst of research occurred in the genetic field: it was carried out in order to discover the genes responsible for the most various traits, from the ones causing diseases to the ones responsible for genetic variation across populations. In fact, the scientific community was convinced that genes retained all the crucial information necessary for organisms’ generation, growth, survival and reproduction (Sarkar, 1998).
One of the fundamental discoveries of the 20th century was that DNA was the genetic code’s physical structure (Watson & Crick, 1953) and, since then, many studies have disclosed the complicated pattern of regulation and expression of genes, which involve RNA synthesis and its subsequent translation into proteins.
Nowadays, if we define genes from a physical/molecular point of view, we usually consider them as a specific sequence of DNA (and its control region), which is inheritable and codes for a product (Protein or RNA) that has a

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