Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 5, 2004

Genes are material entities that parents pass to offspring during reproduction. These entities encode information essential for the construction and regulation of polypeptides, proteins and other molecules that determines the growth and functioning of the organism. The word "gene" is shared by many disciplines, including classical genetics, molecular genetics, evolutionary biology and population genetics. Because each discipline models the biology of life differently, the material entity that supports the gene in one discipline is not the same as in the other. Following the discovery that DNA is the genetic material, and with the growth of biotechnology and the project to sequence the human genome, the common usage of the word "gene" has increasingly reflected its meaning in molecular biology. In the molecular-biological sense, genes are the segments of DNA which cells transcribe into RNAs and translate, at least in part, into proteins. (more...)

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