What does "cistron" mean?

The unit of hereditary material (e.g. DNA) that encodes one protein.

What is a synonym for "cistron"?

Common synonyms include: gene, factor, gene.

Cistron

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
The unit of hereditary material (e.g. DNA) that encodes one protein.
"Holonym: locus"
2
(genetics) a segment of DNA that is involved in producing a polypeptide chain; it can include regions preceding and following the coding DNA as well as introns between the exons; it is considered a unit of heredity wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

gene factor gene

Example

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"Near-synonym: gene (often synonymous)"

Etymology

Coined by American molecular biologist Seymour Benzer in 1957, from cis + trans + -on. Named in the context of using a "cis-trans comparison" for identifying " […] whether two mutants, having similar defects, are indeed defective in the same way."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.