A gene is the functional unit of inheritance which are located on the DNA. The DNA sequence coding for t-RNA or r-RNA molecule also define a gene. A cistron is a segment of DNA coding for a polypeptide, the structural gene in a transcription unit could be said as monocistronic (mostly in eukaryotes) or polycistronic (mostly in bacteria or prokaryotes). In eukaryotes, the monocistronic structural genes have interrupted coding sequences—the genes in eukaryotes are split. The coding sequences or expressed sequences are defined as exons. Exons are said to be those sequence that appear in mature or processed RNA. The exons are interrupted by introns. Introns or intervening sequences do not appear in mature or processed RNA.
Before processing, the primary transcript of RNA contains both exons and introns and are known as heterogenous nuclear RNA/hn-RNA. The split-gene arrangement further complicates the definition of a gene in terms of a DNA segment. Inheritance of a character is also affected by promoter and regulatory sequences of a structural gene. Hence, sometime the regulatory sequences are loosely defined as regulatory genes, even though these sequences do not code for any RNA or protein.