Wednesday, 26 March 2008

genetics - Terminology question: the scope of an allele in an organism

Let us consider a gene FOO with novel type foo.



If I were discussing an organism that has inherited foo in every cell during classical zygote formation, then I would ordinarily just say that the organism has foo.



If I were discussing a SNP of FOO that gives rise to foo in a tumor cell of an organism, I wouldn't say that the organism has foo, but I might say that the tumor has it.



If I were discussing a chimeric or mosaic organism in which some fraction of the chimera had foo and the other fraction had FOO, I would have to say something like "in foo-containing cells ..."



But what if I wanted to particularly draw attention to the scope of applicability of the allele in question? That is, I want to talk about the scope explicitly, rather than implicitly. How could I directly refer to the scope of applicability of an allele? Is there a single adjective that captures the concept of "This organism has foo in every cell except in rare ones where a point mutation may have occurred; it's probably been inherited during normal meiosis" and is there a contrasting term for "The organism only has foo in a particular subset of its cells and there is some other genetic process necessary to explain that."?

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