In article <41729F0718 at mercury.uark.edu>,
Douglas Rhoads <DRHOADS at MERCURY.UARK.EDU> wrote:
>There are/were also `orphan' genes which used to mean duplicated genes
>that inactivated due to mutation. [...]
"Orphon" -- a term defined as "a genomically isolated protein-coding
gene of a member of a gene family that usually occurs in tandem-repeat
clusters." For example, certain histone isoforms are coded by unique genes
unlinked (but obviously related) to the histone genes in the cluster arrays
of Drosophila & sea urchin. Geoffrey Childs, I believe, coined the term in
the early 1980s, although the original observations of histone gene orphons
were late-1970s Hogness lab data that, like many of C.F. Gauss' 19th Century
discoveries in mathematics, were never published in a timely manner.
Mark
--
Mark D. Garfinkel (e-mail: mg16 at midway.uchicago.edu)
(c) 1995; all rights reserved. Permission granted for Usenet quotation
with attribution.
