Talk:Gene structure

Spelling and Grammar
This article was very well written. The topics and the content were relatively relevant to the topic. The only issues with this topic were that there were quite a few spelling errors. For example "Organisation" was spelled wrong. It should be spelled as "Organization." (Yp2h (talk) 01:00, 15 September 2018 (UTC)Yamini Patel)

Definition of a gene
I'd like to start a discussion on the definition of a gene. Many textbooks define a gene as a DNA sequence that's transcribed to produce a functional RNA. This means that there are two types of genes: protein-coding genes and noncoding genes. It also means that the gene is just the DNA that's found between the transcription start site and the transcription termination site. Thus, regulatory sequences are defined as elements that control the expression of genes but they are not part of genes.

I've been discussing this issue on my blog for many years ....

What Is a Gene? https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-gene.html

and Kostas Kampourakis has written a whole book about it (Kampourakis, K. (2017). Making Sense of Genes. Cambridge Univesity Press. Cambridge, UK). He defines a gene as ...
 * "...DNA sequences encoding information for functional products, be it proteins or RNA molecules. With 'encoding information,' I mean that the DNA sequence is used as a template for the production of an RNA molecule or a protein that performs some function." (p. 87)

I think we should adopt this definition, one that doesn't include regulatory sequences.

I also think we need to address some of the misinformation that's out there. For example. reference #2 (Polyak and Meyerson, 2003) says,


 * "According to the “central dogma” of molecular biology, a gene exerts its effects by having its DNA transcribed into an mRNA, which is, in turn, translated into a protein, the final effector of the gene's action."

That statement if flawed for several reasons but it reflects a common (mistaken) view that needs to be discussed in this article. Genome42 (talk) 23:01, 1 June 2022 (UTC)


 * I think you make a reasonable point and I agree that this article could do with updated info. It might also be worth looking back at Gene. Would it be better to move the discussion over to talk:Gene for a broader audience? Either way, I'm generally of the opinion that definitions often draw arbitrary boundaries (I'm thinking about whether introns are 'part of the gene' or cases where regulatory sequences are also part of the coding sequence) and it's definitely worth hilighting on this page that the definition of "which part is the gene" isn't so simple. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 02:01, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Continued at talk:gene and talk:gene - T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 04:04, 2 March 2023 (UTC)