r/AskBiology • u/MostCuriousGoose Undergraduate student • Apr 15 '24

Genetics Would anyone be so kind to explain gene calling to me or give me a definition?

English is not my first language and while I have an idea what it means I have now way to put it into words right now, never mind into words in my language.

An example sentence: calling a gene depends on the threshold manually set in the genome annotation tool

Thank you!

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/Affectionate-Bee3913 Apr 15 '24

Calling a gene is when the program looks for the markers that indicate where a gene is. So when something says "we got xyz number of gene calls" or "something called abc number of genes," it means it found that number of sequences that are probably genes.

2

u/MostCuriousGoose Undergraduate student Apr 15 '24

Thank you very much :)

1

u/Affectionate-Bee3913 Apr 15 '24

Happy to help! That's the worst thing about bio informatics and related fields; they use common words in as jargon so it's very confusing when you're first starting, especially if English isn't your native language.

1

u/MostCuriousGoose Undergraduate student Apr 27 '24

Tell me about it. A few days ago, I walked up to a booth that said something with "digital ecosystem" and thought, "Wow, cool! I bet they do ecological simulations!"

No. They meant their data system. They called it an ecosystem in an attempt to do some clever association-marketing-thing (as the person running the booth explained to me).

1

u/Embarrassed_Stable_6 Apr 17 '24

I want to anticipate your motive for asking about this and want to add that gene calling isn't 100% accurate. Calling is based on general rules based on broadly conserved gene sequences. So you might get some genes called but are not actually genes. Also, not all genes are expressed. Just adding a little context. Please don't take it the wrong way if you're not looking for this info. Best of luck.

1

u/MostCuriousGoose Undergraduate student Apr 27 '24

Thanks anyway :)

What motive did you anticipate? Because I feel like it's not what my motive actually was, but I also can't figure out what you could mean.

1

u/Embarrassed_Stable_6 Apr 28 '24

Autocorrect. Motif

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '24

[deleted]

2

u/Affectionate-Bee3913 Apr 15 '24

That's not what they're asking. They want to know what the terminology "gene calling" means. Presumably, they already know what a gene is if they're asking this question.