At the behest of the biology, the word gene designates the DNA fragment that has been arranged with a fixed order in the chromosomes of living beings and that will be the one that will determine the appearance of the inherited characters in them, that is, this is its primary function, that of transmitting hereditary information. Genes are sub-microscopic corpuscles, that is, very small, which are in our chromosomes, more precisely in the nucleus of cells.
Among its salient characteristics, mutability stands out, while variations are called alleles. Each gene has two alleles, one with the information of the father and the other with that of the mother.
The fact that some individuals have eyes and skin of this or that color, hair of such a shape, among others, will be due to the genes they have, which, as we indicated, are acquired through heredity and will give the person that uniqueness that will distinguish them. from the rest of the same species.
So, to understand it more simply, we could say that the gene is like a code that, among other things, will also tell the cell how it should make proteins or when to activate or deactivate other genes.
It should be noted that the set of genes of a species makes up the genome, which is the totality of the genetic information of an organism or a species. Human beings have 35 thousand genes.
The study of this topic was approached by several scientists, although, it is worth highlighting two that were the ones that contributed the most news, on the one hand, the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel who stood out for enunciating the laws of inheritance and distinguished between two types of genes, hereditary and recessive.
Meanwhile, the concept of gene would only appear in the 20th century, in 1909, and it is due to the Danish botanist Wilhelm Ludwig Johannsen, since Mendel denominated them as hereditary factors.
