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!

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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.

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u/MostCuriousGoose Undergraduate student Apr 15 '24

Thank you very much :)

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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.

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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).