Genetic testing

A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions". Incorrect colloquial usage of the term gene may actually refer to an allele: a gene is the basic instruction, a sequence of DNA, while an allele is one variant of that instruction.