English edit

Etymology edit

From allelo- (other) +‎ -morph (shape), from Ancient Greek ἄλλος (állos, other). Coined by English biologists William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders in 1902, in a paper titled "The facts of heredity in the light of Mendel’s discovery".[1][2]

Noun edit

allelomorph (plural allelomorphs)

  1. (genetics, obsolete) Synonym of allele
    • 1916, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Sex-linked inheritance in Drosophila, page 11:
      In such cases each member acts as the allelomorph of any other member, and only two can occur in any one female, and only one in any male.

Derived terms edit

Descendants edit

  • German: Allel
English: allele

Translations edit

References edit

  1. ^ William Bateson, Edith Rebecca Saunders (1902) “The facts of heredity in the light of Mendel’s discovery”, in Reports to the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society[1], page 3:We thus reach the conception of unitcharacters existing in antagonistic pairs. Such characters we propose to call allelomorphs, and the zygote formed by the union of a pair of opposite allelomorphic gametes we shall call a heterozygote.
  2. ^ William Bateson (1902) Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence, page 27:
    Each such character, which is capable of being dissociated or replaced by its contrary, must henceforth be conceived of as a distinct unit-character; and as we know that the several unit-characters are of such a nature that any one of them is capable of independently displacing or being displaced by one or more alternative characters taken singly, we may recognize this fact by naming such unit-characters allelomorphs.