Believe it or not, the term Translon as the translational unit predates Walter Gilberts 'Exon' (1978). In 1973 Suresh Goel had a letter published in Nature arguing for the establishment of units of Transcription (Transcon) and Translation (Translon). www.nature.com/articles/245...

Here's an interesting paper @natmethods.nature.com introducing the term "Translon", filling a terminology gap in the field of gene expression. Kudos to Pasha Baranov for leading this initiative and gathering many contributors (including myself) for an healthy discussion on fundamental principles 👏

Many transcriptome regions are translated but not known to encode proteins. They remain poorly annotated and thus under studied, partly due to the lack of terminology for these features. In @natmethods.nature.com we propose using "Translon" for any region decoded by the ribosome