ACM Comm 2016 11 Sex as an Algorithm (Notes) (Glossary)
Glossary
- Allele: Variant of a gene. Some are known to affect our susceptibility to diseases.
- Diploidy: The state of having two instances of each chromosome, and thus each gene, in a cell. Organisms with one instance of each chromosome and gene are called haploid.
- Fitness: The ability of an individual to survive and reproduce in its natural environment, manifested in its expected number of surviving offspring.
- Gene: A unit of heredity and a region of the DNA that encodes a functional product. It is thought that humans have more than 20,000 of these. However, now that coding is known to be far more complex than originally thought, it is no longer clear how to define these units and their boundaries.
- Genotype: The whole or a part of the genetic make-up of an individual or that is common to a group of individuals.
- Heterozygous: An individual having two different alleles of a certain gene.
- Mutation: A change in the hereditary material.
- Phenotype: The characteristics of an individual other than its genetic code.
- Recombination: In sexual reproduction, taken broadly, this term means that the genetic material of an offspring is a bricolage of the genetic material of its parents, due to both the independent assortment of chromosomes during the halving of chromosome numbers and the crossing over of chromosomes—the shuffling of segments between two corresponding chromosomes (in humans, typically 2–3 per chromosome)—that occur in the generation of gametes. More generally, DNA recombination in the sense of exchange of genetic material between two DNA molecules or between segments of the same DNA molecule is an important part of mutational mechanisms.
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Parent Article: ACM Comm 2016 11 Sex as an Algorithm (Notes)
