4 Comments

Of Terms in Bi­ol­ogy: Syn­teny

by Elio

Ge­neti­cists are known for hav­ing de­vel­oped a lan­guage of their own. So is just about every­body else in sci­ence. Ergo, look­ing up de­f­i­n­i­tions is of­ten a ne­ces­sity. Today's term is syn­teny (which et­y­mo­log­i­cally means "on the same rib­bon".) You might think that we don't need to worry about this so much in bac­te­ria and ar­chaea, the ma­jor­ity of whom have a sin­gle chro­mo­some. All their genes are syn­tenic by de­f­i­n­i­tion. Syn­teny ap­plies to mul­tichromosomal or­gan­isms – of which there is a size­able num­ber within the bac­te­ria, for ex­am­ple, Rhodobac­ter spher­oides (where this was first ob­served), Burk­holde­ria cepa­cia, and some vib­rios, bru­cel­las, lep­tospi­ras, and rhi­zo­bia. Any­how, we went ahead and looked up syn­teny. We were hop­ing for some en­light­en­ment to share with you. Were we suc­cess­ful? Here are the re­sults.

Source

  • The oc­cur­rence of two or more loci on the same chro­mo­some, with­out re­gard to the dis­tance be­tween them. Source

  • Por­tions of chro­mo­somes in which gene or­der is con­served. Source

  • The term syn­teny was orig­i­nally de­fined to mean that two gene loci share the same chro­mo­some. In a ge­nomic con­text we re­fer to syn­tenic re­gions if both se­quence and gene or­der is con­served be­tween two [closely re­lated] species. Source (Link now bro­ken)
  • Two genes which oc­cur on the same chro­mo­some are syn­tenic; how­ever, syn­tenic genes may or may not be "linked." Source: NHBLI/NCBI Glos­sary

  • In clas­si­cal ge­net­ics, syn­teny de­scribes the phys­i­cal co-lo­cal­iza­tion of ge­netic loci on the same chro­mo­some within an in­di­vid­ual or species. Source

Lots of luck.

 

Other Posts

4 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Mark O. Martin
17 years ago

Whoops! Too bad I am us­ing the "con­ser­va­tion of gene or­der on dif­fer­ent chro­mo­somes" de­f­i­n­i­tion! What is muddy and com­plex, I ar­ti­fi­cially (and prob­a­bly in­ac­cu­rately) clar­ify!

0
Stanley Maloy
17 years ago

I think this is an ex­am­ple where two dif­fer­ent fields, ge­net­ics and ge­nomics, use the same term to mean quite dif­fer­ent things. These fields share an in­ter­est in genes and, al­though not uni­ver­sally ap­pre­ci­ated, each pro­vides unique in­sights and each has dif­fer­ent lim­i­ta­tions — ge­net­ics and ge­nomics are clearly dis­tinct dis­ci­plines from both epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and prac­ti­cal per­spec­tives. The de­f­i­n­i­tion that refers to genes on the same chro­mo­some is used by ge­neti­cists and was based upon the need to de­scribe the clas­si­cal prob­lem of seg­re­ga­tion in diploids. I be­lieve that the al­ter­na­tive de­f­i­n­i­tion that refers to con­ser­va­tion of gene or­der on dif­fer­ent chro­mo­somes de­rived from the need to de­scribe such sim­i­lar­i­ties fol­low­ing the birth of com­par­a­tive ge­nomics.

0
Elio Schaechter
17 years ago

Stan­ley,
Your words are ex­tra­or­di­nary help­ful. They should be etched in stone. You point to a com­mon prob­lem, the changes that take place when a word is used by folks in dif­fer­ent sci­ences. The messy thing here is that the two sci­ences are very closely re­lated, so that this should no have emerged as a prob­lem. But so it goes!
Elio

0
beth
13 years ago

So does any­one ac­tu­ally know what syn­teny means in re­la­tion to bac­te­ria which only pos­sess one chro­mo­some?
Elio replies:
Syn­teny refers to the dis­tance of genes within one chro­mo­some.

0