Talk:Gene/GA3

Clarify the difference among gene, locus and allele (previously GA3)

Note: comments below were initially added as the Good Article review in error. See here for details.

Well, allele seems to be clearly defined. What about gene and locus? In a classical sense, a locus can be a placeholder for the corresponding alleles. Is it also applicable to a gene? If so, what is the difference? If no difference, locus shall be a synonym of gene. By the way, what about a null allele, where a placeholder can be nowhere on the DNA? I am totally confused. ヒストリ案 (talk) 13:31, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Good point, We only mentioned the term locus once! I'm adding a section on Locus/Allele/Gene clarification to the Gene#Chromosomes and Gene#Mendelian inheritance sections. I think that probably explaining null alleles is beyond the scope of this article, but I'll make sure that it comes up in both the allele and locus articles. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 12:08, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo), thank you for improvement. BTW, what happen if "quantitative trait loci" taken into account? Is it a completely different concept, or share some? If the former is the case, why do we use the same term? If the latter, the idea of "a" gene is already confused... ヒストリ案 (talk) 13:35, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

@ヒストリ案: The term Quantitative trait locus isn't quite the same as a gene. A QTL is a region of DNA on a chromosome known to be correlated with some phenotype change, but it can be a gene, or several genes, or part of a gene. Identifying the QTL of some phenotype can be a first step in finding a gene related to that trait. It's actually a bit of an old fashioned term which was used more extensively when we weren't able to exactly define what the DNA sequence of the gene was. It is probably more relevant to the genetics page but could certainly go in the 'see also' section for the moment. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 13:04, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

ヒストリ案, I notice that this is your first-ever edit under this account, and perhaps ever on Wikipedia. Are you prepared to fully review this nomination according to the WP:WIAGA criteria, which is what is required here? If not, we should probably get a new reviewer to undertake the complete review beyond your initial questions. Thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:07, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

BlueMoonset, I apologize for misplacement of my comment. Should I replace all the above somewhere appropriate, or delete them? Thank you for advice. ヒストリ案 (talk) 13:27, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

@ヒストリ案: Your comments are still useful and definitely won't be deleted. The link that you clicked to create this section of the page are part of a process called Good article review in which an editor volunteers themself to do a thorough read-through and assessment of whether the page should be promoted to be Good article status (for example this previous review). If you were not intending to nominate yourself as the GA reviewer then we can just move your comments into the non-review part of the gene talk page. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 12:06, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Any progress so far? The current lede seems to define that a gene is a locus. Is that widely accepted, or not? --Wordmasterexpress (talk) 09:22, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

A paper that clarifies the terminology (incl. gene, locus and allele among of the tens of other terms): Genetic Terminology (2012). Cheater no1 (talk) 18:39, 9 March 2020 (UTC)