SO WHY THE "LOCUS"???

Here is how dictionary.com describes it:

1) A locality; a place.

2) A center or focus of great activity or intense concentration: “the cunning exploitation of loci of power; the insulation from normal American society” (Clifton Fadiman).

3) Mathematics. The set or configuration of all points whose coordinates satisfy a single equation or one or more algebraic conditions.

4) The position that a given gene occupies on a chromosome.

I still remember doing "Functions" in high school and not understanding what a "locus" was and then I had an Oprah moment...

I was at the bus stop with a few friends and we were waiting for one of our parents to come and pick us up from school... we had been discussing a whole lot of different events when two of my friends started moving... At that moment it occurred to me - regardless of how they moved the position in which I was sitting was a perfect "locus" position (not to be confused with the "lotus" position)! They were moving and yet they were both the same distance away from me!

As insignificant as that event was, it has remained with me all these years. A few years after that, I encountered that very same word again. This time in first year biology...

In a biology prac. in which a then PhD student (now a Dr), tried to explain to the class the significance of the Latin word "locus". He used the analogy of a library... "The complete DNA component of an individual is like a library... each of the subject areas is a chromosome... a locus is a shelf describing a particular subject and the alleles are individual books... the pages of these books are the individual bases"

Again I had a clicking moment - I felt that I had truly learnt something! 

There was one other event that completed my discovery of the 'locus' - at the beginning 0f 2003 - by now I had forgotten all about loci and alleles, when its significance was once again presented to me...

Now a third year student and with a well set out plan to study molecular genetics, I entered my third year genetics class and the first question to stare me right at my face was "Describe the difference between a locus and an allele".

A genetic locus is truly a miniscule existence - a position of a single gene amongst the thousands - yet its an essential contribution. We are all like that... each of us play a small role and yet without any one of us - the information is simply not complete.

Above all, the locus is a place and this - the V-locus - is my place...

This page is maintained by Vidya Lakshmi Vasudevan. For comments please email to: vidyav@gmail.com