What are human 2p and 2q in regards to chromosome number 2?

[Anonymous]

I’m looking up stuff about the human chromosome 2 fusion. I ran across this article on PubMed. In the excerpt below, what the heck is “human 2p and 2q”? Is the ‘p’ and ‘q’ another way to say mother and father? Further, just by examining a chromosome pair, say number 2 while we’re there, is there a way to see which parent the two chromosomes in the pair came from without doing DNA comparisons of the parents? I know that in chromosome 23 there’s the X and Y. Y is the smaller and from the father. X is from the mother and larger.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC187548/
Genomic Structure and Evolution of the Ancestral Chromosome Fusion Site in 2q13–2q14.1 and Paralogous Regions on Other Human Chromosomes

“We confirmed the centromere–telomere orientation of the 2qFus contig by FISH analyses of constituent clones on chimpanzee chromosomes (Fig. ​(Fig.2).2). Chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13 are homologous to human 2p and 2q, respectively (Yunis and Prakash 1982; Wienberg et al. 1994).”

[Justin L. Franks]

p and q are the two “arms” of a chromosome, before and after the centromere. The p arm is the shorter arm, and the q arm is the longer arm.

[Author]

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