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

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