Names for things that are only sometimes exons

I am grateful to Myles Axton for introducing the readers of Nature Genetics to his term for coding segments that are less than an entire exon, which is CROE (Touching Base, Jan. 2005). This word is an acronym for "Coding Region of an Exon" and can be pronounced as in "crow." I do indeed feel that such a term is necessary, and it was my appeal at the Drosophila ENCODE meeting (Dec. 5) that got Myles' attention. Soon after my Arabidopsis 2010 grant is submitted to NSF (Jan. 21) I will post here in more detail, explaining why this term should apply as well to coding regions that are coincident with an exon (so that one can say something like "the ORF is broken into seven croes").

I will also be throwing out a second request. We need a term for segments that appear as indels when two alternatively spliced mRNAs (or cDNAs) are compared. The latter can be a complete exon, part of an exon or an intron, and need not be coding.