An allele is one of two, or more, forms of a given gene variant. For example, the ABO blood grouping is controlled by the ABO gene, which has six common alleles. Nearly every living human's phenotype for the ABO gene is some combination of just these six alleles. An allele is one of two, or more, versions of the same gene at the same place on a chromosome. It can also refer to different sequence variations for several-hundred base-pair or more region of the genome that codes for a protein. Alleles can come in different extremes of size. At the lowest possible size an allele can be a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). At the higher end, it can be up to several thousand base-pairs long. Most alleles result in little or no observable change in the function of the protein the gene codes for.
Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is cue, plural cues.
Q.E.D. or QED is an initialism of the Latin phrase "quod erat demonstrandum", literally meaning "what was to be shown". Traditionally, the abbreviation is placed at the end of a mathematical proof or philosophical argument in print publications to indicate that the proof or the argument is complete, and hence is used with the meaning "thus it has been demonstrated".
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range.
An electric field is the physical field that surrounds electrically-charged particles and exerts force on all other charged particles in the field, either attracting or repelling them. It also refers to the physical field for a system of charged particles. Electric fields originate from electric charges, or from time-varying magnetic fields. Electric fields and magnetic fields are both manifestations of the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature.
Division is one of the four basic operations of arithmetic, the ways that numbers are combined to make new numbers. The other operations are addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The division sign ÷, a symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and another dot below, is often used to indicate mathematical division. This usage, though widespread in anglophone countries, is neither universal nor recommended: the ISO 80000-2 standard for mathematical notation recommends only the solidus / or fraction bar for division, or the colon for ratios; it says that this symbol, ÷, "should not be used" for division.
Q fever or query fever is a disease caused by infection with Coxiella burnetii, a bacterium that affects humans and other animals. This organism is uncommon, but may be found in cattle, sheep, goats, and other domestic mammals, including cats and dogs. The infection results from inhalation of a spore-like small-cell variant, and from contact with the milk, urine, feces, vaginal mucus, or semen of infected animals. Rarely, the disease is tick-borne. The incubation period is 9–40 days. Humans are vulnerable to Q fever, and infection can result from even a few organisms. The bacterium is an obligate intracellular pathogenic parasite.
Exclusive or or exclusive disjunction is a logical operation that is true if and only if its arguments differ.
Capacitance is the ratio of the amount of electric charge stored on a conductor to a difference in electric potential. There are two closely related notions of capacitance: self capacitance and mutual capacitance. Any object that can be electrically charged exhibits self capacitance. In this case the electric potential difference is measured between the object and ground. A material with a large self capacitance holds more electric charge at a given potential difference than one with low capacitance. The notion of mutual capacitance is particularly important for understanding the operations of the capacitor, one of the three elementary linear electronic components. In a typical capacitor, two conductors are used to separate electric charge, with one conductor being positively charged and the other negatively charged, but the system having a total charge of zero. The ratio in this case is the magnitude of the electric charge on either conductor and the potential difference is that measured between the two conductors.
Hamiltonian mechanics is a mathematically sophisticated formulation of classical mechanics. Historically, it contributed to the formulation of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. Hamiltonian mechanics was first formulated by William Rowan Hamilton in 1833, starting from Lagrangian mechanics, a previous reformulation of classical mechanics introduced by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1788. Like Lagrangian mechanics, Hamiltonian mechanics is equivalent to Newton's laws of motion in the framework of classical mechanics.
In thermodynamics, the Gibbs free energy is a thermodynamic potential that can be used to calculate the maximum reversible work that may be performed by a thermodynamic system at a constant temperature and pressure. The Gibbs free energy (, measured in joules in SI) is the maximum amount of non-expansion work that can be extracted from a thermodynamically closed system. This maximum can be attained only in a completely reversible process. When a system transforms reversibly from an initial state to a final state, the decrease in Gibbs free energy equals the work done by the system to its surroundings, minus the work of the pressure forces.
In mathematics, a binary operation is commutative if changing the order of the operands does not change the result. It is a fundamental property of many binary operations, and many mathematical proofs depend on it. Most familiar as the name of the property that says "3 + 4 = 4 + 3" or "2 × 5 = 5 × 2", the property can also be used in more advanced settings. The name is needed because there are operations, such as division and subtraction, that do not have it ; such operations are not commutative, and so are referred to as noncommutative operations. The idea that simple operations, such as the multiplication and addition of numbers, are commutative was for many years implicitly assumed. Thus, this property was not named until the 19th century, when mathematics started to become formalized. A corresponding property exists for binary relations; a binary relation is said to be symmetric if the relation applies regardless of the order of its operands; for example, equality is symmetric as two equal mathematical objects are equal regardless of their order.
Quantitative genetics deals with phenotypes that vary continuously —as opposed to discretely identifiable phenotypes and gene-products.
In motorsports, the pole position is the position at the inside of the front row at the start of a racing event. This position is typically given to the vehicle and driver with the best qualifying time in the trials before the race. This number-one qualifying driver is referred to as the pole-sitter.
In mathematics, a rational number is a number that can be expressed as the quotient or fraction p/q of two integers, a numerator p and a non-zero denominator q. For example, −3/7 is a rational number, as is every integer. The set of all rational numbers, also referred to as "the rationals", the field of rationals or the field of rational numbers is usually denoted by a boldface Q ; it was thus denoted in 1895 by Giuseppe Peano after quoziente, Italian for "quotient".
A truth table is a mathematical table used in logic—specifically in connection with Boolean algebra, boolean functions, and propositional calculus—which sets out the functional values of logical expressions on each of their functional arguments, that is, for each combination of values taken by their logical variables. In particular, truth tables can be used to show whether a propositional expression is true for all legitimate input values, that is, logically valid.
Coulomb's law, or Coulomb's inverse-square law, is an experimental law of physics that quantifies the amount of force between two stationary, electrically charged particles. The electric force between charged bodies at rest is conventionally called electrostatic force or Coulomb force. The law was first discovered in 1785 by French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, hence the name. Coulomb's law was essential to the development of the theory of electromagnetism, maybe even its starting point, as it made it possible to discuss the quantity of electric charge in a meaningful way.
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