# gene

Pronunciation: say "JEEN" /d͡ʒiːn/

## Noun

1. A theoretical unit of heredity that may take several values and, in principle, determines a specific trait of an organism's form, such as hair color.
   - Simple: A basic unit that parents pass to their children, helping decide traits like hair color.
   - _Early biologists treated each gene as carrying one inherited trait._
   - _The genes for flower color follow predictable inheritance patterns._
2. A stretch of genomic DNA or RNA that can occur in more than one form and so governs some characteristic of a cell or organism, often a protein's structure.
   - Simple: A small part of DNA that tells the body how to build something, like a protein.
   - _Researchers sequenced the gene that encodes insulin._
   - _Several genes work together to build a single muscle fiber._

## Origin

From German Gen, which comes from Ancient Greek geneá ('generation, descent'), from the aorist infinitive of gígnomai ('I come into being'). The word was coined by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Ludwig Johannsen in 1909 in a German-language publication, taken from the last syllable of pangene.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/gene (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).