Here I decided to make a collections of glossary and definitions that I need and come across while reading a lot of papers
Avidity: The overall strength of binding between an antibody and antigen.
Epigenetics: Epigenetics is commonly defined as the ’study of mitotically and/or meiotically heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in DNA sequence’ Bioinformatics. 2008 24(1):1-10
Functional Turnover: It is the loss or gain of functional entities like genes, transcription factor binding sites etc. For genes functional turnover occurs only in distant species and the complete orthology assumption is largely satisfied when sequences are aligned across phylogenetically closely related species. Short and degenerate patterns like transcription factor binding sites exhibit frequent turnover even across closely related taxa, such as fruit fly species. PLoS Comput Biol 4(6): e1000090. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000090
Haplotype: The pattern of alleles along a single chromosome is defined as the haplotype.
Homeostatis: The homeostatic response is an attempt to maintain the “constancy of internal state” in response to pertubations resulting from environmental fluctuations (e.g expression of osmoprotectants in response to osmolarity stress). Science 2008 320(5881):1313-1317
Purifying (or negative )selection: Selection that eliminates individuals carrying mutations that interfere with important genetic functions. As a result protein coding and regulatory sequences in DNA that are constrained to be involved in highly specific interactions are highly conserved. Because of purifying selection, homologous genes can be recognized over large phylogenetic distances, and it is often possible to construct a detailed evolutionary history of a particular gene, tracing its history back to common ancestors of present-day species. Molecular cell Biology 4th ed. Alberts, Bruce; Johnson, Alexander; Lewis, Julian; Raff, Martin; Roberts, Keith; Walter, Peter New York and London: Garland Science; c2002
Ontology: Ontologies provide a structured description of biological information that is extermely useful for computational management. ref: Bioinformatics. 2004 Mar 1;20(4):578-80
Regulatory potential: It is a score that evaluates the extent to which patterns in an alignment (strings of alignment columns) are more similar to patterns found in alignments of known regulatory elements than in alignments of ancestral repeats, which are a model for neutral DNA. Genome Res. 15:1051-1060, 2005
