Posted by ROSHAN B.S on Oct. 21, 2014, 6:58 p.m.
A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions . Colloquial usage of the term gene (e.g. "good genes", "hair color gene") may actually refer to an allele: a gene is the basic instruction— a sequence of nucleic acids (DNA or, in the case of certain viruses RNA), while an allele is one variant of that gene. Thus, when the mainstream press refers to "having" a "gene" for a specific trait, this is customarily inaccurate. In most cases, all people would have a gene for the trait in question, although certain people will have a specific allele of that gene, which results in the trait variant. Further, genes code for proteins, which might result in identifiable traits, but it is the gene (genotype), not the trait (phenotype), which is inherited