Word.ws English Dictionary

cistron

cistron noun: the unit of hereditary material (e.g. DNA) that encodes one protein.

Noun

cistron (plural cistrons)

  1. The unit of hereditary material (e.g. DNA) that encodes one protein.
    • Holonym: locus
    • Near-synonym: gene (often synonymous)
    Synonyms:
    gene

Synonyms of cistron

Forms of cistron

pluralcistrons

Origin of cistron

Coined by American molecular biologist Seymour Benzer in 1957, from cis + trans + -on. Named in the context of using a "cis-trans comparison" for identifying " […] whether two mutants, having similar defects, are indeed defective in the same way."

Words formed from cistron

Questions about cistron

What does cistron mean?
Cistron means the unit of hereditary material (e.g. DNA) that encodes one protein.
What part of speech is cistron?
Cistron is a noun.
What is the plural of cistron?
The plural of cistron is cistrons.

Words near cistron in the dictionary

  1. cistophorus
  2. cistrome
  3. cistromes
  4. cistromic
  5. cistromics
  6. cistron
  7. cistronic
  8. cistronically
  9. cistrons
  10. cists
  11. cistula

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cistron (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cistron.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cistron. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.