Genomes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A complete set of genetic material present in an organism, encompassing all its genes and non-coding sequences
2. The totality of an organism's hereditary information encoded in DNA or RNA, including all functional and non-functional elements
3. The full collection of sequences that constitute the genetic blueprint of a species, influencing its biological traits and functions

Etymology: Hans Winkler, a German botanist, coined "Genom" in 1920 in a study of parthenogenesis, the development of an embryo without fertilization, in plants and animals. He needed a name for the complete set of hereditary material in a cell, and he built it by blending "Gen" (gene) with "Chromosom" (chromosome). The result took the front of one word and the back of the other, and the spelling was later adjusted to read as "gene" plus the suffix "-ome." That suffix is the part readers may find most surprising, because "-ome" now marks a whole family of scientific terms. Once "genome" existed, it was treated as a pattern: a word ending in "-ome" names the total of a particular kind of biological material, so researchers later used the same pattern for the proteome, the transcriptome and other sets of molecules.

Synonyms: genetic material