And with Lepidoptober coming fast...

In 1891, Stoney coined electron as the unit of electric charge borrowing the neuter Greek suffix -on. Others followed with proton, neutron cementing “-on” as the mark of a fundamental unit. In the 50s we got cistron, codon as the units of gene expression were defined and then exon, intron, translon

Believe it or not, the term Translon as the translational unit predates Walter Gilberts 'Exon' (1978). In 1973 Suresh Goel had a letter published in Nature arguing for the establishment of units of Transcription (Transcon) and Translation (Translon).
www.nature.com/articles/245...

Here's an interesting paper @natmethods.nature.com introducing the term "Translon", filling a terminology gap in the field of gene expression. Kudos to Pasha Baranov for leading this initiative and gathering many contributors (including myself) for an healthy discussion on fundamental principles 👏

Writing this short correspondence sparked great semantic discussions with leaders of a diverse set of fields and particularly among the primary instigators of this initiative (myself, Michał Świrski, Eivind Valen and Pasha Baranov)

Full Text:
rdcu.be/eDnOj

Just as Walter Gilbert's exon/intron terminology ('Why genes in pieces?', Nature 1978) gave us language to discuss and understand gene structure, 'Translon' aims to provide vocabulary to better conceptualise the pervasive, largely still enigmatic, translation revealed by Ribo-Seq

Many transcriptome regions are translated but not known to encode proteins. They remain poorly annotated and thus under studied, partly due to the lack of terminology for these features.

In @natmethods.nature.com we propose using "Translon" for any region decoded by the ribosome