A broad operational definition is sometimes used to encompass the complexity of these diverse phenomena, where a gene is defined as a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products. This definition categorizes genes by their functional products (proteins or RNA) rather than their specific DNA loci, with regulatory elements classified as gene-associated regions.
Try to answer this question if possible (otherwise reply "unanswerable"): What does the typical definition of a gene categorize genes by?
their specific DNA loci